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Iraq Uncensored

Perspectives / American Security Project

Fulcrum Publishing

Part One

The Coming of the War

Informed Decisions: Process before Policy

Paul R. Pillar

How we draw lessons from the experience in Iraq is important and itself reflects on the lessons of the Iraq experience. The substantive issues raised by the war — ranging from the utility of military force to principles of counterinsurgency, prospects for democratization, trends in Middle Eastern politics, and much else — are so numerous and complex that it is difficult to avoid drawing wrong lessons along with the right ones.

In any future situation in which one might hope to apply the lessons learned painfully in Iraq, it will be essential to assess that situation carefully to identify how it may differ from, as well as resemble, Iraq. The process of assessment must consider all the relevant variables that can affect US interests, all the possible ways of pursuing US objectives and the pros and cons of each way, and all the things that could go wrong, as well as their likelihood of going wrong.

The implication of this is not that we should prejudge the results of any one assessment. Instead, it is to ensure that such assessments are made and that they are fully applied to, and reflected in, decisions on foreign policy.

That brings us to the most egregious shortcoming exhibited in the Iraq episode, one that underlies the entire ill-fated expedition and thus underlies so many other specific problems and potential lessons to be learned: there was no process that used the resources and perspectives in the executive branch of the government (nor tapped available expertise outside government) to consider whether or not to launch the war.

It is not that there was a defective process — there was no process. There was no meeting, no options paper, and no other forum in which basic considerations and arguments about whether or not to invade Iraq were ever examined. There was much discussion inside the executive branch aimed at selling the decision to invade, and some also at implementing the decision, but not at making the decision in the first place.

At least that is what we know based on the record to date, including the first draft of history that journalists have written. If there were any discussions about the actual decision to go to war, they were confined to the most impenetrable private conversations of the president, vice president, and conceivably a few others. For future historians who will write subsequent drafts, the most astounding thing about this momentous initiative — launching America's first major offensive war in over a century — will be that the Bush administration took it without ever first examining systematically whether it was a good idea.

The absence of any process for vetting the war decision meant that a host of important considerations were never brought to bear on that decision. Especially important among those considerations were the many challenges and ramifications of trying to pacify, reconstruct, and politically transform Iraq. The absence of a process meant that even when parts of the bureaucracy had insights and input to offer, there usually was no audience for those inputs. And it meant that with no clear line between pre- and post-decision phases of the lead-up to war, the line between professional responsibility and insubordination also became blurred. Offering candid, even if unsolicited, advice to decision makers is appropriate behavior before a decision is made; saluting and pursuing the mission is most appropriate after the fact.

The absence of a policy process within the administration was part of a larger deficiency, involving Congress, the press, and the public, in failing to examine carefully and critically everything that should have been examined before endorsing the war. What passed for a debate was largely confined to the administration's selling points of weapons of mass destruction and terrorist links, with huge unfilled gaps in logic between premises contained in the sales campaign and any conclusion that an invasion was advisable. There are other lessons to be learned from the deficiencies in that debate, although some of what transpired reflects inherent weaknesses of a democracy making foreign policy. But the starting point for the deficiencies that followed was the absence of debate within the administration itself.

So the single biggest lesson of Iraq is: have a policymaking process. Before making a major foreign-policy decision, much less selling it to the public or implementing it, engage every relevant department and agency in a thorough examination of all of the national interests at stake and all of the ways in which different possible courses of action will affect those interests.

The executive branch is no stranger to such processes. Although each new administration tweaks the interdepartmental machinery for making national security policy, there are well-established procedures for reviewing and debating policy options as part of preparing an issue for decision by the president, even though those procedures were conspicuously absent in the case of Iraq. The question is not one of thinking up new procedures, but rather of willingness to use them consistently.

There is no good way for outsiders to enforce such consistency, beyond asking tough questions about how decisions were made. Each president gets the policymaking procedures that he or she wants. It is future presidents, therefore, who need to absorb this particular lesson. Absorption may depend on those future presidents realizing that pursuit of even the most principled objectives may have flaws, and that even bureaucracies — annoying as they sometimes seem — may have something useful to say in pointing out both flaws and opportunities.

A Very Bad Idea from the Start

Robert Gallucci

The United States launched a military operation against Iraq without a compelling reason for doing so. We may have learned a lot from our many mistakes after the end of large-unit military operations and the fall of Baghdad, but a larger lesson should be drawn from the decision to invade Iraq in the first place. This was not a good idea badly executed; it was a very bad idea from the start.

Much has been made of the failure of the intelligence community to correctly characterize Iraq's capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological, and nuclear. And, in fact, the intelligence assessment did mistakenly have Iraq in possession of chemical and biological weapons. But it did not assert that Iraq had nuclear weapons, only that it could build such weapons more quickly than other countries — if it were to acquire the necessary fissile material — because it had done essential research and development before the first Gulf War.

This is not a fine point; it is a fundamental one. The administration never explained how it presumed biological and chemical weapons threatened the United States or its allies, where Iraq would acquire sufficient fissile material to build a militarily significant nuclear capability, or why the United States' overwhelming conventional and nuclear forces could not deter Iraq from acting against American interests and its friends in the Middle East.

There were, to be sure, suggestions from the policy community that Iraq was connected with terrorists and even to those responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001. But the intelligence community did not support those claims.

Iraq did not attack anyone in 2003, nor was it about to attack anyone. At best, the United States launched a preventive war without sufficient evidence that America's vital interests would ever be put at risk by Iraq. At best, we were responding to Iraq's flagrant violation of numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions, without the support of the international community. At best, we miscalculated and overreached.

At worst, we went to war, invaded a country, and overthrew a government in order to shape the political landscape of a region more to our liking, not to stop aggression or to defend vital interests. Nor was this an intervention launched for humanitarian reasons, to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's oppression. This was not an essential part of the argument — at least not before the invasion.

The lesson, then, from our experience in Iraq is that the United States should go to war only when there are compelling reasons to do so, reasons that can be articulated by the government and stand up to the scrutiny of the Congress and the people.

Real Faith in the Public Square

John Bryson Chane

In his book The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, Yale law professor Dr. Stephen Carter expressed the concerns of many about the negative impact of religious power when it mixes too intimately with political power. His writing reveals one of the great tragedies that preceded the Bush administration's push to engage in a preemptive war with Iraq in 2003. Carter wrote:

But the greater threat comes when the church is no longer kept merely separate but is forced into a position of utter subservience, its voice disregarded in the greater public discussions or even disqualified from joining them. The real danger is that citizens in general will accept the culture's assumption that religious faith has no real bearing on civic responsibility. Should that happen, prevailing cultural mores will have a higher claim on us than do privately held convictions of conscience, however arrived at. When faith is removed from public life, when we divorce religion from politics, we marginalize religion to the point that the values that ultimately guide and help society behave in a reasonable and compassionate fashion are lost to the current and prevailing values of the culture.

There is little doubt that the administration did all in its power to co-opt the leadership of all the mainline religious denominations in the United States to support its invasion plans to remove Saddam Hussein from power and to impart a distorted version of Western democracy to that country. The administration believed that success in Iraq would breed success in other Islamic Middle Eastern countries considered to be hostile or antithetical to American interests. The neoconservative political movement that was the driving force behind American foreign policy — especially during the first four years of George W. Bush's presidency — led the American people to believe that there was a clear connection between the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Iraq. To press that point and to build on the fear of the American people generated by these attacks on American soil, the administration believed it was critical for the broad base of American faith communities to weigh in, support a preemptive strike against Iraq, and by doing so lend credibility to the administration's actions.

In the autumn of 2002, I received an invitation from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to attend a briefing with a small number of religious leaders from the United States at the Pentagon. The briefing packet I received prior to the meeting outlined US military strategy currently in place in Afghanistan. The invitation came at a time when I had been the bishop of Washington for only a few short months and the opportunity to discuss matters concerning our foreign policy in the Middle East with both Secretary Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, was an invitation I couldn't refuse. As one who opposed any further military incursion into the Middle East beyond Afghanistan, I had become increasingly concerned with the administration's rhetoric about Iraq and the accusations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The administration's war drums were beginning to beat loudly in November 2002 to engage in military action against Iraq on the theory that such military action would remove the much-hated dictator Saddam Hussein from power and would also reduce the threat of terrorism directed against the United States. I viewed the invitation to attend the Pentagon meeting as an opportunity to express my point of view as a religious leader that such an incursion into Iraq, instead of decreasing the threat of terrorism, would act as a major recruiting tool for a whole new wave of well-trained terrorists who would increase the likelihood of further attempts to do harm to Western governments, their citizens, and institutions. I was also concerned that to shift our focus from the Taliban and to engage in a military operation against Iraq would weaken our military presence in Afghanistan. Such a move would strengthen the hand of the Taliban at a time when significant progress by American military forces had been achieved in routing them from their brutal control of that country.

It was also my belief, a belief shared by many others at the time, that real energy needed to be generated by the administration to take an active leadership role in effectively putting into place the "Road Map for Peace" between Israel and Palestine. It was no secret that many Arab countries viewed Israel's incursions into Palestinian territory, and blatant disregard for United Nations Resolutions prohibiting such action, as the cause of great concern in the Middle East. The United States needed to be responsive in pushing forward the road map in the eyes of most Arab nations. For them this was a first-order priority that needed the leadership of both the United States and Great Britain.

At the November Pentagon meeting, the conversation led by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld switched quickly from Afghanistan to Iraq. The switch appeared to be no accident given the increased media coverage on Iraq and the fact that religious leaders including my own presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Reverend Frank Griswold, were present. "Shock and awe" as a strategy was placed on the table for discussion for the first time and to me appeared as a craftily designed program of three days of highly technical, precisely pinpointed heavy bombardment of the Iraqi army and the command centers of Hussein that, according to Rumsfeld, would force the Iraqi military to surrender en masse and lay down its arms. Collateral damage would be minimal in such an engagement and civilian casualties could be kept very low. Invading American forces would ultimately be welcomed by the Iraqi people as liberators from Hussein and their Sunni, Baathist oppressors. It all sounded so surrealistic that I sat in the meeting for the first ten minutes in utter disbelief at what I was hearing. Nothing so complex as overthrowing the regime of Hussein and the Baath Party and finding parity between Iraq's different ethnic and sectarian communities could be so easily explained as a military strategy lasting only three short days.

Discussing the cost of such an operation, the religious leaders were told that the total cost of this military engagement would only impact the United States Treasury by about $80 billion and most of that would be reimbursed by the sale of Iraqi oil.

I and several others asked about the intelligence the Pentagon said it had about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. We were told that the evidence was clear and reliable: that Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and that since those weapons had been used by the Iraqi army against Iranian troops in the Iran-Iraq war, he would deploy them again if need be against his neighbors and US military forces. There were hints that Iraq had also been working on developing a nuclear capability that was unacceptable to the United States and American interests in the Middle East. As religious leaders, we were reminded once again by the secretary of defense that Hussein was a Sunni secularist, wrapped up in the repressive and murderous policies of the Baath Party. Sunnis were a distinct Muslim minority in Iraq, and the minority repressed Iraq's Shia Muslim majority through terrorism, political assassinations, and torture, using every possible means of coercion available to maintain control. Likewise, the Kurds in northern Iraq had suffered a similar fate under Hussein. The evidence against Hussein, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz asserted, required immediate action by the United States.

Religious representatives asked other questions about whether there was a correlation between poverty, feelings of hopelessness, humiliation, and unemployment that could be a leading cause of an increase in the rise of terrorism in the Middle East. We also asked whether the Pentagon and the administration had thought about what would happen after shock and awe, when the tables were turned on the religious leadership in that country, and the Shiites who had been repressed by the minority Sunnis gained the freedom to exert their influence and power over their political and religious oppressors. Those questions went unanswered, except for the one on poverty, which, we were told, was a question for the churches to address.

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Excerpted from Iraq Uncensored by James M. Ludes. Copyright © 2009 American Security Project. Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
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