I started writing this post before we vaporized Qassem Soleimani a few days ago, after reading some of the Washington Post's coverage on internal government documents over a 15 year period regarding our progress, or lack thereof, in military and nation building operations in Afghanistan. From my perspective while the documents added interesting details there was nothing in the overall assessment that should not otherwise have been evident for anyone paying a modicum of attention to the news from Afghanistan over the past decade. Our efforts in constructing a new nation has been a failure, costly in dollars and lives. Whenever we leave that country it will plunge back into its own natural course.
The articles did prompt me, with the advantage of hindsight, to reflect on our efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider Middle East (ME).
Afghanistan
I supported the initial invasion of Afghanistan based on the need to
eliminate Al Qaeda’s use of that country as a base of operations and
still believe that to be correct. Once that mission was accomplished the attempt
to fundamentally transform that country was folly - withdrawal was the better
step.
Our 21st century experience should teach us the impossibility of
fundamentally transforming Muslim dominated countries. We are poorly
equipped from many perspectives to do so. Interestingly you can argue, based
on our ME experience and the experience of European countries dealing
with massive Muslim immigration, that Islam, even as a minority, has
been more successful in fundamentally transforming European democracy
than we have been attempting the reverse in the ME.
The better course once Afghanistan had been dealt with would have been to inform
the leaders of all Muslim dominated countries that the U.S. had no
interest in regime change or in how those leaders governed their
countries. They would also be informed that the U.S. would be vigilant in protecting the security of
the United States and of its citizens at home and abroad and would take
whatever unilateral actions were necessary to achieve that. If it meant
launching drone strikes or Special Forces targeted missions we would do
so. As an example it has been widely reported that in the late 90s, the Clinton Administration striking an Al Qaeda camp where Bin Laden was known to be present but called off the strike because of the presence of a royal family member from one of the Gulf States at the same camp. The failure to do so helped Al Qaeda rapidly metastasize in the late 90s, training thousands of potential terrorists in the Afghan camps prior to 9-11. Under my proposal we would warn every one of these nations that we would take whatever actions necessary, regardless of the presence of their civilians and would have attacked the camp even at the risk of killing the royal family member.
It is necessarily an imperfect solution, likely to require repeated application over time, but so has been our long
time presence in Afghanistan and my proposal would have entailed much
less cost and loss of American life.
Although it was not a campaign pledge by Obama in 2008 I suspected he wanted to withdraw and hoped he would do so (one of the few things I would have supported him on) and was disappointed when he didn't.
Iraq
I was initially on the fence regarding the proposed invasion but
eventually came down in favor of it because post 9/11 the risk
equation had changed for me. I was a WMD guy and felt the risks too great of
not doing anything particularly because, at that point, the alternative
was a rapidly collapsing sanctions regime (the forgotten context from 2002-3) and an unleashed Saddam. In the end the lack of an
active Iraqi WMD program combined with the post-invasion actions by
the Bush Administration, based on its goal of fundamentally transforming Iraq, made it a disastrous decision. We would have
been better off instead encouraging the already significant tensions between
Iraq and Iran.
The intelligence failure was attributable to erroneous, but not
manipulated, intelligence due to two factors. The first is the post WW2 pattern
of our intelligence agencies going through cycles of overestimating and
then underestimating our foes. A common failing of many large
organizations is preparing for the last war by trying to avoid repeating
mistakes but overcompensating in the process. We saw this throughout the
Cold War when it came to analyzing Soviet capabilities. The only time
we got it right, with the reassessment of Soviet economic strength in
the early 80s, was the sole time we were able to align political
strategy with accurate intelligence. Regarding Iraq, prior to the 1991
war our intelligence agencies drastically underestimated the extent of
Saddam’s biological and chemical warfare capabilities and completely
missed his nuclear program. The reaction was to overestimate Saddam’s
capabilities over the next decade, a reaction enhanced by the next
factor.
Saddam’s campaign to convince
everyone outside Iraq he had kept WMD was indeed successful. He deliberately acted
in ways consistent with retaining WMD. Certainly his neighbors believed it; in his memoirs the American military commander for the invasion, Tommy Franks, recounted discussions with King Abdullah of Jordan and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in which they told him Saddam had a sizable chemical and biological weapons capability. Al Gore and Joe Wilson (of
16 Words fame) opposed the war
because they believed Saddam had a sizable chemical and biological arsenal which would cause enormous U.S. casualties. I remember a conversation with a
friend prior to the war when we were discussing this and wondering about
whether Saddam was bluffing about WMD but our immediate reaction was “
nobody could be that stupid!“. Well, he was. It was Iran he was bluffing though, not the West.
In September 2004, the
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (more popularly known as the Duelfer Report; about 1,000 pages in length) was issued. The report, which I read, was based on extensive post-war interviews with Iraqi military and political leaders, as well as a review of internal Iraqi documents.
It turned out
that only a very small circle of Iraqi leaders knew before the war that
Saddam had secretly destroyed most of his WMD arsenal. He told other leaders and
the most senior military commanders about it only on the eve of the
American attack. Even then commanders in the field were left in the
dark. When interviewed about WMD, they would claim while they didn’t
have any, they were sure one of the divisions on their flanks had it. When the
flank division commanders were interviewed they didn’t have WMD but
figured the divisions on their flanks did.
The other revelation in the Duelfer Report was while Saddam destroyed his WMD arsenal he'd kept his scientific and industrial capabilities in place enabling him to quickly rebuild his arsenal once sanctions were lifted. Given Saddam's predilection for massive miscalculations I believe the result within a few years would have been either another Iraq-Iran War or another confrontation with the West but, in this case, the United States would have had much more support than in 2003 (of course by then Saddam may have rebuilt his WMD arsenal and could inflict more casualties). In any event, the goal should have been destruction of those capabilities, rather than regime change or the futile task of transforming Iraq into a democracy.
Recent Events
Let's start by entering the
WABAC Machine because we can only understand the current situation by knowing how we got there. Since the Iranian revolution, the regime of the mullahs has had the initiative most of the time. The Carter administration tried appeasement and a flaccid and tentative response to the hostage crisis. Both the Reagan and Clinton administrations got played in their search for the ever elusive Iranian "moderates". As mentioned above the GW Bush administration managed to create a power vacuum in Iraq largely filled by the Iranians who've increasingly made Iraq a client state.
During those decades the Iranians, mostly through surrogates, sponsored bombings of American military facilities, assassinations in Europe and attempted assassinations and bombings in the United States, seizing and murdering Americans, and supporting terrorists in Lebanon and Gaza. Since 1979 the Iranian regime has proclaimed itself at war with America.
The already unstable situation metastasized with the actions of the Obama Administration which sought to "rebalance" American policy in the Middle East by strengthening Iran, a course of action which also required accommodations with Russia. The capstone was the Iran Nuclear Deal which, as I wrote four years ago, was never about nuclear weapons:
Iran does not need the bomb in the short-term now that it has what it wants;
huge amounts of cash to fund its foreign objectives, a clear message
sent to the Sunni states that it, not the U.S, is the big dog in the
region, the leisure to determine whether and when it suits their needs
to break out of the constraints of the deal (and even if they don't
break out of the deal, Iran now has the right to have nuclear weapons
when the deal expires in 15 years) and retaining the American hostages
to get further goodies.
The reason this deal is acceptable to the President is because
its primary purpose was never about Iran dismantling its nuclear program
(though, if as part of the process the Iranians did so THC is
sure the President would have been fine with that as it would have made
his job easier). In order for there to be a U.S. - Iranian
rapprochement and thus for Obama's hoped for chance of improvements in
relations that would lead to cooperation and allow the U.S. to withdraw
from the Middle East, Iran had to be managed into at least nominal
compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Without that, the
President would not have the maneuvering room to improve relations.
That's why a managed trajectory that eventually allows Iran to become a
nuclear power if it choose that route was just as good as dismantling a
program because it provided enough of a fig leaf for the U.S. and Europe
to say "it's a deal!".
The nuclear deal will make substantial funds available to the Iranian
regime. One of the themes of the President has been that because Iran's
economy and infrastructure is in such bad shape that the influx of
billions of dollars will have to be spent on internal improvements, not
on increasing havoc in the Middle East or on armaments programs. THC
believes this statement indicates the President's weakness in math. The
ending of sanctions will make about $150 billion available to Iran
apart from the billions more that will begin flowing in as it sells oil
and strikes business deals.
It is estimated that Iran's total financial support to the Assad regime
in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza is about $7 billion a
year. Iran could double its financial support for these groups for the
next five years and it would still have more than 75% of its financial
windfall available for internal improvement and that does not even
include the additional ongoing revenues from the end of sanctions
related to oil.
You can read my full analysis of the Iran Nuclear Deal here; I believe it stands up to the test of time and wrote it before we learned of the astonishing action of the Obama Administration in secretly shipping $1.7 billion
in cash to Iran in January 2016, done in such as way as to avoid existing U.S. sanctions!
As part of the nuclear deal, U.S. sanctions were lifted on Qassem Soleimani and he was left free to travel wherever he wanted without fear. He went to Russia to negotiate with Putin and spent much time in or working to develop militias in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, after previously leading the IED campaign in Iraq which killed 600 U.S. military personnel. As Iran has grown its sphere of influence in the Middle East, it's had the side effect of creating a tacit alliance between two other big regional players, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
On top of all of this we had the Syrian Civil War in which Iran supported the Assad regime and the U.S., after inviting Russian intervention, decided to support rebel "moderates" including Al Qaeda affiliated groups.
And then there was the rise of ISIS, which saw the U.S. reinsert forces back into Iraq working, at some level, with Iranian supported militias directed by Soleimani.
Meanwhile, Iran has started small level attacks and harassing operations on British and American navies operating in the Persian Gulf as well as oil tankers and launching missiles at Saudi oil production facilities.
Until the past week, the Trump Administration had acted with restraint. However, the recent Iranian directed attack on a U.S. base provoked a reaction which, in turn, the Iranians used to try to storm the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Whether they were trying to create another Tehran or Benghazi embassy situation can't be known for certain.
I support the elimination of Soleimani. The normal American response since 1979, with the exception of the 1987 destruction of the Iranian navy, has been to be either passive or to react at a relatively low level, hoping to send a signal to the mullahs. Instead, it's allowed the mullahs to dictate the next steps (a lesson we should have learned from Vietnam - read
Dereliction of Duty). President Trump's action sends a clear message - I passed on earlier situations and did not retaliate hoping you would see reason, but when I do respond it is going to be on my terms, not on yours. I approve that message. The mullahs may or may not read the new message correctly but they certainly did not read our past messages as we thought they should.
However, there is a big
but here. Our goal should be removing the 5,000 remaining American soldiers in Iraq, rather than leaving them to help mop up ISIS, all the while having to maneuver between the Iranian supported militia and a largely Shiite population in Iraq generally sympathetic to Iran. It is time to leave. Whatever other actions we might need to take in the event of future Iranian attacks they should not involve American boots on the ground (other than Special Forces raids). No more permanent or semi-permanent presence in these countries.
