REVISIONS IN NEED OF REVISING:

WHAT WENT WRONG IN THE IRAQ WAR

David C. Hendrickson

Robert W. Tucker

December 2005

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iii

FOREWORD

 David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker examine the 

contentious debate over the Iraq war and occupation, focusing on 

the critique that the Bush administration squandered an historic 

opportunity to reconstruct the Iraqi state because of various critical 

blunders in planning. Though they conclude that critics have made 

a number of telling points against the Bush administration’s conduct 

of the Iraq war, they argue that the most serious problems facing 

Iraq and its American occupiers—criminal anarchy and lawlessness, 

a raging insurgency, and a society divided into rival and antagonistic 

groups—were virtually inevitable consequences that flowed from 

the act of war itself. Military and civilian planners were culpable in 

failing to plan for certain tasks, but the most serious problems had 

no good solution. The authors draw attention to a variety of lessons, 

including the danger that the imperatives of “force protection” may 

sacrifice the broader political mission of U.S. forces and the need for 

skepticism over the capacity of outsiders to develop the skill and 

expertise required to reconstruct decapitated states.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THE AUTHORS

DAVID C. HENDRICKSON is Robert J. Fox Distinguished Service 

Professor at Colorado College. He has taught in the Political Science 

Department at Colorado College since 1983. He is a member of the Council 

on Foreign Relations. Dr. Hendrickson is the author of Peace Pact: The Lost 

World of the American Founding (University Press of Kansas, 2003), The 

Future of American Strategy (Holmes and Meier, 1987), Reforming Defense: 

The State of American Civil-Military Relations (Johns Hopkins, 1988) and 

three books with Dr. Robert W. Tucker: The Imperial Temptation: The New 

World Order and America’s Purpose (Council on Foreign Relations, 1992); 

Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford University 

Press, 1990), and The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of 

American Independence (Johns Hopkins, 1982). He was the book review 

editor (“United States”) for Foreign Affairs from 1994 to 1998, and has 

published essays in Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal, The National 

Interest, Orbis, and Survival. Dr. Hendrickson received his B.A. in history 

from Colorado College in 1976 and his Ph.D. in political science from 

Johns Hopkins University in 1982. 

ROBERT W. TUCKER is Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy 

at the Johns Hopkins University, Nitze School of Advanced International 

Studies. He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and 

Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Tucker is the author 

of The Nuclear Debate: Deterrence and the Lapse of Faith (Holmes and Meier, 

1985); The Inequality of Nations (Basic Books, 1977), The Radical Left and 

American Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins, 1971), Nation or Empire? The Debate 

over American Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins, 1968), The Just War (Johns 

Hopkins, 1960); and three books with Dr. David C. Hendrickson: The 

Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America’s Purpose (Council 

on Foreign Relations, 1992); Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas 

Jefferson (Oxford University Press, 1990), and The Fall of the First British 

Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence (Johns Hopkins, 1982). 

He was co-editor of The National Interest from 1985 to 1990, and president 

of the Lehrman Institute from 1982 to 1987. He has published essays in 

Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal, The National Interest, Harpers, and The 

New Republic. Dr. Tucker received his B.S. from the United States Naval 

Academy in 1945 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of 

California, Berkeley, in 1949.
v

SUMMARY

 The dramatic contrast between expectations and reality in the Iraq 

war has sparked a wide-ranging debate over “what went wrong.” 

According to many critics, civilian planners made a series of critical 

mistakes that have turned what might have been a successful war and 

occupation into a fiasco. The most common critique takes roughly 

the following form: 

 • Though the war plan to topple Saddam was brilliant, planning 

for the peace was woefully insufficient. 

 • The United States did not have a sufficient number of troops 

to restore order in Iraq after the U.S. invasion and also failed 

to develop a plan to stop the widespread looting that occurred 

in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. 

 • The administration erred in disbanding the Iraq army, which 

might have played a valuable role in restoring security to the 

country.

 • The United States erred further in its harsh decrees proscribing 

members of the Ba’ath party from participation in Iraq’s 

public life—a decision, like that which disbanded the army, 

needlessly antagonizing the Sunnis and pushing many of 

them into the insurgency. 

 • The Bush administration needlessly antagonized the 

international community—including both the United Nations 

and our European allies—and made it much more difficult 

to obtain help for the occupation and reconstruction of the 

country.

 • The Bush administration was too slow in making funds 

available for reconstruction and created a labyrinth 

bureaucracy for the awarding of contracts. 

 These revisions, the authors argue, are themselves in need of 

revising. Though the critics have made a number of telling points 

against the conduct of the war and the occupation, the basic 

problems faced by the United States flowed from the enterprise 
vi

itself, and not primarily from mistakes in execution along the way. 

The most serious problems facing Iraq and its American occupiers—

“endemic violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning economy, 

and a decimated society”—were virtually inevitable consequences 

that flowed from the breakage of the Iraqi state.

 The critique stressing the insufficient number of forces employed 

in the invasion, though valid abstractly, exaggerates the number and 

type of forces actually available for the conduct of the war. Once 

account is taken of the exigencies of a multi-year campaign, the 

stresses on active and reserve forces created by maintaining troops 

in the 108,000 to 150,000 range, and the unrealism of assuming 

significant allied contributions (given the opposition of public opinion 

to the war in most allied states), it would have been impossible to 

generate force levels in the 300,000 to 400,000 range called for by 

many critics.

 Plans for “Phase 4” operations, which were given little attention 

before the war, failed to anticipate the most serious problems facing 

U.S. forces after the fall of Baghdad—persistent anarchy and the 

emergence of a raging insurgency. This was a mistake, as critics 

point out, but it is very doubtful that U.S. forces could have gotten 

a handle on the problem even had these contingencies received the 

planning they deserved. 

 A war plan keyed to the problem of postwar disorder would 

have inevitably confronted a substantial gap in time between the 

disintegration of the state and the arrival of forces of sufficient 

size to establish order. A different plan in all probability could 

have prevented the worst consequences of the looting, such as the 

destruction of irreplaceable cultural sites and important government 

ministries, but the larger consequence of widespread anarchy 

probably was unavoidable. 

 It was clearly a mistake to misperceive the size and motives of 

the insurgency, but it is not so clear that there was a solution to 

the problem once its scale had been fully appreciated. Most armed 

opposition was created by the invasion itself and would likely have 

arisen even had U.S. forces employed milder tactics or employed a 

different political strategy.

 It is very doubtful that the reconstitution of the Iraqi army could 

have stemmed the immense disorder of occupied Iraq. At best, there 
vii

are unanswered questions regarding who might have officered 

the force, the functions it would have performed, and its political 

orientation and reliability. Though U.S. forces did not give the training 

of Iraqi forces the attention it deserved in the first year of occupation, 

the limited results were due, also, to the artificial character of the 

national forces the United States sought to build. 

 Criticisms of the political course followed by the United 

States—the creation and administration of the Coalition Provisional 

Authority, persecution of the Baathists, distrust of the Shia (through 

cancellation of local elections)—all have merit. At the same time, 

the more fundamental truth is that the United States had thrust 

itself into the middle of a bitterly divided society, and there was no 

apparent way to split the difference between groups whose aims 

were irreconcilable.

 Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was in basic respects a test of the 

theory that civilians must intervene in the military planning process 

and force their perspectives down the chain of command. Though 

the record of Iraq war planning does nothing to advance the case 

for civilian activism, critics also have neglected the larger lesson that 

there are certain limits to what military power can accomplish. For 

certain purposes, like the creation of a liberal democratic society 

that will be a model for others, military power is a blunt instrument, 

destined by its very nature to give rise to unintended and unwelcome 

consequences. Rather than “do it better next time,” a better lesson is 

“don’t do it at all.”

 Other lessons are that the military services must digest again the 

lesson that “war is an instrument of policy.” The profound neglect 

given to re-establishing order in the military’s prewar planning and 

the facile assumption that operations critical to the overall success 

of the campaign were “somebody else’s business” reflect a shallow 

view of warfare. Military planners should consider the evidence that 

occupation duties were carried out in a fashion—with the imperatives 

of “force protection” overriding concern for Iraqi civilian casualties—

that risked sacrificing the broader strategic mission of U.S. forces.

1

REVISIONS IN NEED OF REVISING:

WHAT WENT WRONG IN THE IRAQ WAR

 It is already a cliché that much has gone wrong in the American 

war against Iraq.1

 Two years after the invasion by U.S. and coalition 

forces, the contrast between what American officials expected would 

occur, and what in fact did occur, is stark. A telling symbol of that 

contrast was the deployment of 150,000 U.S. troops in the country 

on the eve of the January 30, 2005, elections. Before the war, by 

contrast, Pentagon planners had assumed that U.S. forces might be 

reduced to as little as 35,000 by the fall of 2003. Before the war, U.S. 

military officials did not take seriously the prospect that a raging 

insurgency might face the U.S. occupiers and had assumed that 

widespread revulsion among Iraqis against Saddam Hussein’s rule 

would translate quickly and effectively into support for a temporary 

American occupation. In actuality, Iraqi opinion—especially 

outside the Kurdish community—proved far more hostile to the 

U.S. occupiers than had been foreseen, such that overwhelming 

majorities in the Sunni community and a substantial portion of the 

majority Shia community deemed the United States an “occupying” 

rather than a “liberating” power. Before the war, administration 

officials minimized the financial costs of the enterprise, emphasizing 

that Iraq’s oil resources would enable the Iraqis to pay the lion’s 

share of the costs of reconstruction. In truth, the costs of the Iraq 

occupation have proven to be far greater than had been predicted, 

with special congressional appropriations amounting to $192 billion 

by May 2005, and much more on the way.2 Even with such large 

expenditures, precious little reconstruction had actually taken place 

in Iraq a year-and-a-half into the occupation. Only $1-2 billion of the 

$18 billion authorized for reconstruction by Congress in late 2003 had 

been expended a year later, and Iraqis had yet to see much tangible 

improvement in employment or quality of life after a year-and-a-half 

of occupation. A study by the Center for Strategic and International 

Studies in Washington, DC, argued that, in every area necessary for 

a successful reconstruction of Iraq, there had been not only lack of 

progress but an actual deterioration of conditions on the ground.3

The best case, according to a Chatham House study in the fall of 
2

2004, was that a new Iraqi government, buttressed by U.S. military 

power and given a boost by elections in early 2005, would hang on in 

the face of a continuing insurgency. The worst case was that Iraq was 

headed toward a breakup of the country and protracted civil war.4

 The dramatic contrast between the administration’s hopes and the 

reality it confronted has sparked a wide-ranging debate over “what 

went wrong.” According to a legion of critics, the planners of the Bush 

administration made a series of critical mistakes that have turned 

what might have been a successful war and occupation into a fiasco. 

The most common critique takes roughly the following form: though 

the war plan to topple Saddam was brilliant, planning for the peace 

was woefully insufficient.5

 The United States did not have a sufficient 

number of troops to restore order in Iraq after the U.S. invasion and 

also failed to develop a plan to stop the widespread looting that 

occurred in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. Though 

the U.S. State Department had conducted a comprehensive study 

of the problems of occupying Iraq, its conclusions were ignored 

by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to the extent that the 

Director of the State Department study on the future of Iraq, Thomas 

Warrick, was excluded by the administration from joining Jay 

Garner’s team.6

 The administration erred, according to the critics, in 

disbanding the Iraq army, which might have played a valuable role 

in restoring security to the country, and it erred further in its harsh 

decrees proscribing members of the Ba’ath party from participation 

in Iraq’s public life—a decision, like that which disbanded the army, 

needlessly antagonizing the Sunnis and pushing many of them into 

the insurgency. The Bush administration also needlessly antagonized 

the international community—including both the United Nations 

(UN) and our European allies—and made it much more difficult to 

obtain help for the occupation and reconstruction of the country. 

It was too slow in making funds available for reconstruction and 

created a labyrinth bureaucracy for awarding contracts. 

 These views represent the opinions of left-leaning writers and 

critics; many of them were featured prominently in John Kerry’s 

presidential campaign in 2004. Right-leaning authors have joined 

in some of this criticism—especially the argument that the United 

States invaded with too few forces—but their emphasis often has 

differed. Some argue, for instance, that the many U.S. troubles 
3

stemmed from the fact that the war was conducted in too humane 

a fashion, such that the enemy never really was defeated. Others 

argue that the original Pentagon plan for the war called for a rapid 

transfer of sovereignty to an appointed Iraqi government followed 

by elections, and that that this plan, which would have stood a much 

better chance of providing Iraqis with a sense of “ownership” over 

their own society, was mistakenly shelved and the decision made 

to install a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) with a very slow 

timetable for writing a constitution and holding elections.7

 These criticisms do not exhaust the litany of errors the Bush 

administration is said to have committed in the course of the Iraq 

war, but they represent a broad swath of the criticism that had 

developed as of late 2004. Underlying them is the conviction—

sometimes explicitly voiced, at other times merely implicit—that the 

administration “squandered an unprecedented opportunity.”8 Had 

things been done differently, it is often assumed, the United States 

would have faced a far more pleasant prospect than it did 2 years 

after the initial invasion. This criticism has arisen most often from 

those who supported the invasion and were distressed by how badly 

the occupation fared, but even critics of the war have often left, if 

only by implication, the same impression. The problem with U.S. 

policy in Iraq, in short, lay not in the end chosen but in the means 

embraced, and had those means been different, the outcome would 

be different as well. 

 These revisions, we shall be arguing, are themselves in need 

of revising. Though the critics on both the left and the right have 

made a number of telling points against the conduct of the war 

and the occupation, it is not so clear that different choices on the 

part of civilian or military officials would have led to a significantly 

improved outcome. We can see the deleterious consequences 

flowing from certain of the administration’s decisions, but we can 

only speculate about what consequences might have followed had 

a different route been taken. Nevertheless, strong reasons exist for 

believing that the most serious problems facing Iraq and its American 

occupiers—“endemic violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning 

economy, and a decimated society”9

—were virtually inevitable 

consequences that flowed from the breakage of the Iraqi state. At 

best, the critics have pointed to policies that, had they been adopted, 
4

would have provided the necessary conditions for a successful war 

and occupation. Whether they would have been sufficient, however, 

must be subject to grave doubt. 

 “Success,” of course, is subject to varying measurements, and it is 

to be expected that the larger political assessment of the Iraq war will 

continue to provoke deep divisions. Advocates of the war, whose 

shaken optimism recovered with the November 2004 offensive 

against Fallujah and the January 2005 elections, are likely to remain 

advocates even if political and economic reconstruction remains 

elusive. However bad it gets, the answer is ready that something 

much worse lay in prospect had Saddam Hussein been left in 

power. Opponents of the war, who insisted that containment and 

deterrence were workable policies that need not have been displaced 

by preventive war, will continue to deplore the war as causing great 

and unnecessary dangers, but now must deal with the new reality 

created by the American occupation—above all, the disastrous 

strategic implications of an Iraq that dissolves into warring statelets 

or remains an economic wasteland.

 The larger argument that rages, and that will continue to rage, over 

the justification of the Iraq war is not our concern in this monograph. 

Here we want to focus on the decisions made in the initial year of 

the intervention and ask whether they were those best calculated 

to achieve the results the administration wished to achieve—the 

creation of a secure, liberal, and democratic Iraq. The exercise is not 

entirely an academic one. Like the long argument that arose over 

the Vietnam War, the lessons drawn from the Iraq experience will 

unavoidably exert a profound influence over force structures, war 

strategies, and public attitudes for a long time.10

Obstacles to a Successful Reconstruction.

 Three great problems have emerged since the fall of Saddam’s 

statues in April 2003: criminal anarchy, a protracted insurgency, 

and a society deeply divided on ethnic and sectarian lines. Each 

of these has ramifications for the ability of the occupying power to 

provide security. “If you don’t master security,” noted one observer, 

everything else “gets washed away like sand castles on the beach.”11

It is, as it were, the sine qua non of economic reconstruction, political 
5

rehabilitation, and the fostering of a new civil society.12 If we are to 

think clearly about the “might have beens” of the Iraq war, these 

three factors, and the bearing they have on the provision of security, 

are clearly of crucial significance. If the critical accounts of the 

planning and implementation of the Iraq war are to be accepted, it 

must be shown that a different course of action would have dealt in 

a satisfactory fashion with these formidable obstacles. 

 The widespread looting that occurred after U.S. forces raided 

Baghdad and toppled Saddam’s statues on April 9, 2003, symbolized 

the problem of criminal lawlessness and anarchy that has pervaded 

Iraq since the regime’s collapse. By the time it had run its course 

(after which there was little left to loot), virtually no industrial plant, 

government ministry, or cultural institution was left intact. Over the 

course of the following months, a spasm of car-jackings, kidnappings, 

and murders emerged that added to the sense of a society under 

siege. Saddam, as one columnist put it, had not been replaced by 

Bremer but by Hobbes—the state of nature in which life was “solitary, 

poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This widespread criminal anarchy 

dug a hole from which the occupiers have found it very difficult to 

emerge. It not only made the challenge of reconstruction immensely 

more difficult, but made freedom seem indistinguishable, in the 

Iraqi mind, from anarchy. By demonstrating that coalition forces 

could not control the basics of security, the persistence of anarchy 

undoubtedly gave a significant fillip to the resistance.13

 The second obstacle to a satisfactory reconstruction has been 

the emergence of a protracted guerrilla and terrorist insurgency, 

which American planners also failed to anticipate. “What we were 

really hoping,” commented one U.S. commander, “was to just go 

through, and everyone would wave flags and stuff.”14 It is now 

clear that the insurgency enjoys advantages on its own terrain that 

are just as formidable as the precision-guided weaponry deployed 

with devastating effect by the United States. Because U.S. forces can 

destroy everything they can see, they had no difficulty in marching 

into Baghdad and forcing the resistance underground. Once 

underground, however, the resistance acquired a set of advantages 

that have proved to be just as effective as America’s formidable 

firepower. Iraq’s military forces had no answer to smart bombs, but 
6

the United States has no answer—at least no good answer—to car 

bombs. Iraq’s military forces were powerless to resist America’s 

overwhelming dominance in the air, but, by the same token, America 

finds it very difficult to guard against insurgents able to strike 

unprotected targets. American losses are painful and unexpected, 

but the key strategic vulnerability does not consist of the 1,706 dead 

and 12,855 wounded American soldiers.15 It has consisted instead 

of the insurgents’ capability to sow such conditions of fear and 

insecurity as to make extremely difficult the various tasks required 

for the reconstruction of the Iraqi state and the rehabilitation of its 

economy. The American invaders and the Iraqi resisters have both, 

in their different ways, confirmed the old adage that it is far easier to 

destroy than to create. For the side for whom “not losing” is the key 

imperative, that circumstance makes for a profound advantage; for 

the side that must win, as the occupying power must, it is a profound 

and perhaps fatal handicap.16

 The third important obstacle to the success of the American effort 

is that Iraq is a profoundly divided society. Ruled historically by 

the Sunni minority who comprise approximately 20 percent of the 

population, Iraq also contains a minority of Kurds in the northern 

part of the country and a majority Shia population (estimates range 

from 55 to 65 percent) whose base of power is in the south, but who 

are to be found also in Baghdad and points north. The existence of 

these historic divisions has made problematic any reconstruction of 

the Iraq government. Any solution that gave power or significant 

advantage to one of these groups at the expense of another 

immediately raised the prospect of civil violence. Over the course 

of the past 2 years, significant factions within each of these groups 

have threatened noncooperation or violence if their vital interests 

were not safeguarded. The Kurds, for example, threatened secession 

from Iraq unless they gained control of Kirkuk, a city they consider 

to be theirs but from which they were driven by Saddam Hussein’s 

“Arabization” campaigns.17 Most Shia, by contrast, tolerated the 

American occupation, but only on the condition that the United 

States was seen to be moving rapidly toward democratic elections 

that would give them power. The Sunnis, who have been the biggest 

losers of the U.S. invasion and were the ethnic base of Saddam 

Hussein’s regime, provided the largest number of fighters for the 

insurgency.
7

 These are clearly formidable obstacles; any one, by itself, would 

have posed fundamental problems for the occupying force. Together, 

they have made for an extremely difficult situation. Clearly, it has been 

the parlous security situation that has made economic reconstruction 

go so slowly. This program was undoubtedly misconceived in the 

exclusive role given to American primary contractors (required by 

Congress) for expenditures in Iraq, but misgivings over its character 

have been greatly heightened by the bad security situation and 

the need to divert funds from civilian infrastructure to protective 

forces.18 So, too, projects for building civil society could barely get off 

the ground when participants feared for their lives. The insurgency, 

as one observer noted, “sucked the oxygen out of the liberal 

experiment,” with large numbers of Iraqi liberals having “taken 

refuge behind barbed-wire gates, fled the country, gone broke, or 

been murdered.”19

 Given the vital importance of providing security for the 

reconstruction of Iraq, and the fatal role that insecurity has played 

in making progress in every other sector highly problematic, it is 

remarkable that neither the problem of acute anarchy nor that of a 

raging insurgency were anticipated by American war planners before 

hostilities commenced. Though there was a plan for “Phase 4” (postcombat) operations that anticipated the potential for large numbers 

of refugees and the possible destruction of Iraqi oil facilities, the 

plan did not foresee what turned out to be the most serious dangers 

confronting the occupation.20 In one sense, of course, these failures 

amount to a kind of directed verdict against the civilian and military 

war planners. It is only a kind of verbal legerdemain that allows 

observers to say that the war plan was superb and the peace plan 

was a bust. The United States has been at war in Iraq since March 

2003; it cried “peace” when there was no peace; victory when there 

was no victory.

The Numbers Game.

 One persistent criticism is that the invasion was mounted with 

altogether insufficient U.S. forces. The Bush administration, writes 

Larry Diamond, “was never willing to commit anything like the 

forces necessary to ensure order in postwar Iraq.” Diamond believes 
8

that “around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq 

largely secure after the war,” but also insists that “different kinds of 

troops, with different rules of engagement,” were needed, including 

“vastly more military police and other troops trained for urban 

patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace maintenance 

and enforcement.”21 Others have put the numbers needed much 

higher. According to one study, the same ratio of peacekeepers to 

population as in Kosovo would generate a force requirement of 

480,000 troops for Iraq; if Bosnia were the model, 364,000 would be 

required.22 James Fallows, in his incisive critique of American war 

planning, notes that the original military plan (prepared in the 1990s 

by then U.S. Central Command [CENTCOM] commander Anthony 

Zinni and later updated) called for an invasion force of 400,000. Over 

time, in response to the persistent objections of Secretary Rumsfeld, 

it was pared back so that only some 200,000 forces were in theater at 

the time of the Iraq invasion. Of these, less than half were actually 

in Iraq itself when Baghdad fell as a consequence of the “rolling 

start” to the operation. One division, scheduled to invade Iraq from 

Turkish territory, had been refused admittance by the Turks and was 

in transit to Kuwaiti ports; most remaining forces were marshaling 

in Kuwait.23

 That additional U.S. forces would have been useful can scarcely 

be denied. Iraq’s borders were left unguarded for a year, according to 

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and clearly more might have been done 

on that score. Also, a large number of ammunition dumps across the 

country were left unguarded for months, including critical facilities 

like the al-Qaqaa one south of Baghdad. U.S. forces were clearly shorthanded in dealing with the anarchical conditions in Iraq. Even when 

looters were arrested, there was no place to put them and no way to 

process them, and they were simply released.24 The large number of 

Iraqis swept up into the U.S.-managed prison system—approaching 

some 40,000 in the first year alone, of whom about 9/10ths were not 

part of the insurgency—were processed by U.S. forces that were 

“overworked, overwhelmed, and under-resourced.”25

 But two large qualifications to the critique stressing insufficient 

U.S. forces committed to Iraq must be made. The first is that the United 

States did not actually have in possession the requisite numbers of 
9

the “different kinds of troops” that critics, not unreasonably, insist 

ought to have been sent. Second, and more seriously, a much larger 

force at the beginning would have substantially decreased the ability 

of the United States to maintain higher force levels over the course 

of the occupation. Indeed, experience from spring 2003 to fall 2004 

indicates that ground forces were stretched extremely thin by the 

pressures of maintaining a force in the 108,000-150,000 range, to 

say nothing of the 300,000-500,000 that critics have called for, with 

unsustainable reliance on National Guard and Reserve units and a 

“broken” mobilization system. A large number of American troops 

at the beginning would only have been possible if there had been 

a rapid drawdown by fall 2003. Once the problem is seen as one 

of maintaining a force over a protracted period (say, 3 to 5 years), 

there is simply no way to generate those large numbers within 

existing force constraints. It might be argued, of course, that had the 

initial invasion force been 300,000-400,000 troops, the later problems 

confronting the occupiers would have been substantially reduced,26

but this is unlikely. Even if considered probable, it would still have 

been a big risk. Military planners were just as blind as civilians in the 

Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) to these factors. They, too, 

assumed it would be a “quickie,” a glorious one-night-stand from 

which an uncomplicated withdrawal would be possible. Very few to 

none were thinking in terms of the protracted commitment that now 

seems all but inevitable.27

 One way of solving this problem was to obtain sizeable 

contributions from allied nations. This was, in fact, part of the 

Pentagon’s prewar plan. It called for four divisions (one from 

the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO], one from Great 

Britain, one led by Polish forces, and one from the Arab Emirates) to 

replace withdrawn U.S. forces. It was modeled, that is to say, on the 

previous multilateral experience of the 1990s in which the Americans 

“made the meal,” and NATO and UN forces “did the dishes.” As 

it happened, however, only the British and Polish-led divisions 

materialized. The failure to gain additional international support 

was a criticism often directed against the Bush administration by 

domestic critics. The absence of UN authorization is one part of this 

indictment, but another part is that 90 percent of the casualties and 
10

the cost of the war has fallen on American shoulders. John Kerry in 

particular made this a central part of his campaign against Bush in 

the 2004 presidential elections, but calls to increase the international 

character of the foreign presence in Iraq have been part of the litany 

of criticisms from the beginning. “We’ve got a real problem because 

it’s an American face as the occupier,” argued Democratic senator 

Bill Nelson of Florida. “The anger and frustration of Iraqis could 

have been avoided had it been the world community occupying Iraq 

and stabilizing it instead of us.”28

 This critique, however, is more properly focused on the decision 

to go to war in the first place rather than on the failure to gain much 

allied support in the aftermath. Public opinion in allied countries 

that might provide support was unconvinced by the three rationales 

the Bush administration offered for the Iraq war—that war was 

necessary to enforce UN resolutions calling for Iraq’s disarmament; 

that war, in any event, was justified to deprive Iraq of its weapons 

of mass destruction (WMD); and that war, finally, was imperative to 

free the Iraqi people from the grip of a cruel tyrant.29 Instead, solid 

majorities in most allied countries found U.S. actions to partake 

of some mixture of the illegal, immoral, and imprudent.30 Because 

the nations that might have provided outside support were mostly 

democracies, public opinion inevitably constrained their ability to 

offer troops. Even sharp opponents, however, did not actively obstruct 

U.S. actions. The UN Security Council in May 2003 recognized the 

United States as the occupying power and subsequently the council 

and the secretariat contributed constructively, under the mediation 

of Lakhdar Brahimi, to the formation of the interim Iraqi government 

and a plan for nationwide elections. (Recall that influential Shia 

leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani refused to meet with Bremer, and they 

never exchanged so much as a bow.) 

 The UN’s formal acceptance of the occupation, however, did not 

have a transformative effect on Iraqi opinion, and it is doubtful that 

even a larger UN presence would have done so. The tragic loss of 

the UN mission under Sergio de Mello in August 2003 made it clear 

that terrorists and insurgents would target any group cooperating 

with the U.S. mission in the country. This, in turn, meant that the 

call for additional foreign forces under a UN banner was made in 
11

circumstances in which there would be real danger. The traditional 

model of UN peacekeeping assumes that there is a peace to be kept, 

and that UN workers can go about their mission of state-building 

without extreme peril. These were not the conditions of post-invasion 

Iraq. The 30 UN officials in Iraq who worked on the organization 

of the January 2005 elections were themselves largely confined to 

the Green Zone, and the unions representing UN workers warned 

Secretary General Kofi Annan against sending them to areas where 

their lives would be imperiled.31

 The situation with respect to UN workers also pertains to the 

prospect of significant forces from other countries. The Governing 

Council appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) 

made it clear that it wanted no soldiers from states bordering Iraq, and 

vetoed a Turkish offer to send forces. Though the Bush administration 

did get a UN Security Council resolution passed calling on member 

states to aid in the reconstruction effort, contributions from other 

states were mostly symbolic and well below prewar expectations.32

Given the overwhelming unpopularity of the war in the countries 

most often mentioned as likely providers of outside forces—France, 

Germany, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—the odds that more 

adroit diplomacy could have succeeded in eliciting this effort seem 

not too great. 

 Once one dismisses the prospects of significant allied contributions—which followed from the unilateral character of the war—and 

once one takes into account the need to plan for a protracted instead 

of a one-time deployment of U.S. soldiers, the numbers question 

appears dramatically different. Critics stressing the need for much 

larger U.S. forces have not taken these factors into account. There 

were real constraints on the numbers available to prosecute the 

war. 

Avoiding Anarchy.

 Of all the missteps of the U.S. invasion, surely the most important 

was the failure to stop or deal seriously with the widespread looting 

and anarchy that enveloped Iraq, and most especially Baghdad, 

in the days and weeks following the collapse of the Iraqi regime. 
12

Despite attempts to downplay the scale of the disaster by Secretary 

Rumsfeld—freedom, he said, is “untidy”—the episode clearly 

had extremely prejudicial effects on the prospects for a successful 

occupation. That it would have been desirable to prevent this is very 

nearly self-evident, but it is not clear whether it would have been 

possible, even had the will been present and had the contingency 

received the planning it deserved.

 The reasons for the lack of preparedness in dealing with budding 

anarchy and lawlessness are complex. Some evidence indeed suggests 

that American officials in the first few days made no attempt to stop 

the looting because they believed that the mob would direct its 

anger at the symbols of the old regime and take revenge on the same 

people that U.S. forces were themselves pursuing. Commented one 

Iraqi political scientist educated at Princeton: 

I believe the United States has committed an act of irresponsibility with 

few parallels in history, with the looting of the National Museum, the 

National Library, and so many of the ministries. People are saying that 

the United States wanted this—that it allowed all this to happen because 

it wanted the symbolism of ordinary Iraqis attacking every last token of 

Saddam Hussein’s power.33

This is an exaggeration, but one that nevertheless contains a degree of 

truth. The United States did not want the destruction of the National 

Library and other cultural treasures, but it did want the symbolism 

of ordinary Iraqis striking the Ba’athists. It just got much more than 

it bargained for, and by the time it realized that what was happening 

was fundamentally prejudicial to American interests in ensuring a 

successful reconstruction, much of the damage had been done.34

 The failure to deal with the looters had further causes. Warnings 

from outside observers that anarchy would be a real and formidable 

danger after the regime fell were not reflected in the orders given 

to American units participating in the fall of Baghdad. The units of 

the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) that took the city had no 

orders for “Phase 4” operations and were forced to improvise on the 

spot.35 Though the administration was warned previous to the war 

that certain cultural institutions like the National Museum would 

be endangered, the scale of the looting came as a great surprise 
13

to American officials and to many Iraqis themselves, who were 

shocked at the criminality that “freedom” unleashed.36 The toppling 

of Saddam’s statues did not signal the end of Iraqi resistance, which 

moved underground but continued to attack U.S. forces, and this 

made it difficult to transition to “peace and stability operations.” Over 

and above these considerations was the belief that the peacekeeping 

and stability tasks needed after the invasion were “someone else’s 

mission,” not in keeping with Army’s warrior ethos.37

 On the basis of these considerations, it is not difficult to establish a 

certain culpability on the part of U.S. forces in failing to contend with 

the wholesale criminality and anarchy unleashed in Iraq. Nor can 

this culpability be assigned simply to Secretary Rumsfeld and OSD. 

Had the need for peacekeeping and law-enforcement capabilities 

been behind the military’s preference for a larger invasion force,38 it 

would have been reflected in the orders issued to the units that took 

Baghdad, and there is no evidence that it was. What is misleading 

about this interpretation is not the contention that CENTCOM ought

to have had a well-developed plan to deal with the looting, but the 

assumption that it would have successfully mastered the problem 

had it done so. This seems implausible. The criticism too readily 

assumes that if problems are foreseen, there must in principle be a 

solution to them. In all probability, however, a war plan keyed to the 

problem of postwar disorder itself would have inevitably confronted 

a substantial gap in time between the disintegration of the state and 

the arrival of forces of sufficient size to establish order, creating a 

window of opportunity for looting that even a far-sighted plan could 

not have closed. There is, moreover, substantial evidence that some 

of the destruction was carried out by Iraqi intelligence agents and 

could not have been guarded against, even had a determined effort 

been made to do so.39 That the deliberate fostering of anarchy was 

part of Saddam’s plan is also suggested by his release of some 100,000 

criminals from Iraqi prisons several months before the invasion. Nor 

was the anarchy confined to Baghdad: looters arose from Mosul in 

the north to Basra in the south and attacked an astonishing array of 

targets across the country. A different plan could in all probability 

have prevented the worst consequences of the looting, such as the 

destruction of irreplaceable cultural sites and important government 
14

ministries, but it is difficult to see how the larger consequence of 

widespread anarchy, with all its implications for the success of the 

American mission, could have been avoided. In large measure, this 

consequence flowed directly from the breakage of the Iraqi state.

 Seen in broadest perspective, the breaking of the state in effect 

destroyed Iraq’s immune system, making it vulnerable to a host of 

ailments. Among these were criminal anarchy, the ease with which 

foreign terrorists set up shop on Iraqi territory, widespread access 

to arms, and a protracted insurgency. These consequences followed 

from the act of war itself. They may have been mitigated by a 

fundamentally different war plan, but they were likely to ensue even 

if military plans had been informed by greater foresight and better 

calculated to meet the dangers presented.

The Emergence of the Insurgency.

 Reflecting on the emergence of a protracted insurgency, some 

American military officials and outside observers have concluded 

that the United States was “too gracious” in its victory.40 President 

Bush himself has spoken of a “catastrophic success,” by which he 

meant to say that the Ba’athist regime had not really been defeated 

during the phase of “major combat operations.” Sometimes this is 

attributed to the inability to secure Turkish approval for launching 

part of the U.S. attack from the north, from which it might have swept 

through the Sunni Triangle region northwest of Baghdad and dealt 

summarily with Ba’athist resisters. Whatever the case, there is little 

question that the phase of major combat operations did not really 

defeat the regime. Before the war, the U.S. military had expected 

a formal surrender from units that would remain intact; instead, 

Iraqi military units simply dissolved. Many soldiers just went home, 

relieved that their service was at an end. Many others, it is apparent, 

faded underground with the intention of continuing resistance. 

 Because those Iraqi forces willing to continue the fight against 

the United States were not defeated, it is often assumed that U.S. 

forces might have followed a strategy that could have defeated 

them. Like the strategy for dealing with anarchy, however, this, too, 

is implausible. The Iraqi insurgents were not somehow obliged to 
15

present themselves in such a fashion as to be destroyed by precisionguided U.S. firepower. Indeed, one could argue that Saddam 

Hussein played far more into the hands of the United States than was 

advisable. In attempting a futile defense of Baghdad, he moved many 

units into positions that were easily detectable by U.S. reconnaissance 

and just as easily destroyed. His logical strategy from the beginning 

was never to confront the U.S. military with massed forces, for in 

such a fight his troops were certain to be annihilated, but to save 

them for the coming resistance.41 This, too, casts an interesting light 

on “one of the most brilliant invasion successes in modern military 

history,”42 for what the attackers aimed at—the dissolution of formal 

resistance by Iraqi main force units—was the very thing it was in the 

interest of the defender to accept. What the attackers did not think 

of—the emergence of a guerrilla insurgency that would seek to make 

reconstruction impossible—was, by contrast, the very thing that it 

was most likely the defender would adopt.43

 It is clear, in any event, that the insurgents have proved themselves 

far more cunning and determined than initial estimates predicted. 

The insurgency also has enjoyed a number of advantages stemming 

from its superior knowledge of the terrain—a “home-field advantage” 

that is far more significant in guerrilla war than in competitive 

sports. In the first place, the insurgency enjoyed widespread access 

to arms and explosives. Given the ubiquity of such materials in Iraq, 

it was probably impossible to reduce seriously the insurgents’ access 

to them, even if a determined effort had been made to guard the 

arms depots. Second, the capacity of the insurgents to strike from 

unexpected directions inevitably made U.S. forces suspicious of any 

approaching Iraqi. It has sometimes been argued that the isolation 

of the occupying forces, whether in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone 

in Baghdad or in armed patrols throughout the country, worked 

strongly against gaining the trust of the population, but this was a 

consequence forced on the occupiers by the insurgency. It is not clear 

that anything could have been done about it, save at the risk of much 

greater casualties for U.S. forces or administrators. Perhaps the key 

advantage enjoyed by the insurgents was the capability of putting 

U.S. forces in situations where the military response would further 

antagonize the population and make any contact with them a source 

of profound danger. 
16

 The vulnerabilities that events have disclosed have included 

the assassination of Iraqis working with U.S. forces in any capacity, 

whether as translators, police, or soldiers, together with the threats 

made against their families; attacks on oil facilities and other vital 

infrastructure projects; strikes against the country’s transportation 

arteries, making safe travel and logistical resupply extremely 

problematic; the incessant attacks on patrolling U.S. forces; and the 

kidnapping or killing of workers for nongovernment organizations 

(NGOs) and commercial enterprises needed to rebuild Iraq’s 

infrastructure. 

 Guerrillas classically are able to place occupying forces in 

situations where they are “damned if they do and damned if 

they don’t.” U.S. forces made determined efforts to root out the 

insurgency, but these measures had the effect of increasing hostility 

toward them in the broader population. Insurgents setting off 

roadside bombs sometimes attacked U.S. forces responding to the 

disaster, so U.S. forces frequently adopted the tactic of spraying fire 

rather indiscriminately once they were attacked—an expedient that 

did not endear them to the local population.44 So, too, one of the 

most alarming and depressing features of even the most egregious 

terrorist attacks against civilian targets has been locals on the scene 

screaming their hatred at the United States and holding U.S. forces 

responsible.

 It seems apparent that the insurgency could not have enjoyed the 

success it has without support from the local population. American 

officials repeatedly characterized the insurgents as die-hard Ba’athists 

or foreign terrorists; it is now understood that there are multiple 

groups with varying agendas.45 U.S. officials also minimized the 

overall number of insurgents throughout the first year after the fall of 

Baghdad, usually placing the size of the insurgency at from 2,000 to 

5,000 men. By fall 2004, unofficial estimates from American military 

officers put the number at 20,000; a British general in the south put 

it at 50,000; one U.S. intelligence analyst placed it, conservatively, 

at 100,000 among Sunnis alone.46 With opinion polls in spring 2004 

showing some 50 percent of Iraqis expressing the belief that attacks 

on occupying forces were morally justified in some instances, the 

number of sympathizers was certainly in the millions. Whatever the 
17

true number of insurgents, there seems little doubt that U.S. forces fell 

into the trap of believing their own propaganda—failing in particular 

to understand that most insurgents were probably motivated by a 

nationalistic or religious revulsion against the invader or feelings of 

revenge for a wrong done a kinsman rather than by attachment to 

Saddam or al-Qaeda. It was clearly a mistake to misperceive the size 

and motives of the insurgency, but it is not so clear that there was a 

solution to the problem once its scale had been fully appreciated. 

 The most critical weakness of the U.S. forces was the absence of 

good intelligence. One Army officer on patrol in the Sunni triangle 

noted that 90 percent of the information fed to his unit by Iraqi 

informers turned out to be bogus. It was the imperative of gaining 

better intelligence with respect to the sources and composition of the 

resistance that led directly to the Abu Ghraib scandal, perhaps the 

most dramatic instance of how a response to an insurgency may itself 

compound an occupying force’s alienation from the population. But 

this alienation also followed from the incessant raids that U.S. forces 

conducted against suspected insurgents. The humiliation of seeing 

one’s door broken down, the male inhabitants tied up, houses and 

apartments ransacked for weapons, female undergarments scattered 

about, was such that these tactics could only increase the numbers 

of those willing to join the insurgency.47 The same is true of the vast 

number of persons who passed into the U.S. prison system in Iraq. 

At the same time, it is not clear that a far less aggressive approach 

would have worked. It may well be true that various U.S. practices 

have made the insurgency larger and more determined than it 

would otherwise have been, but it is also highly probable that for a 

substantial core of fighters, the willingness to resist the occupation 

through force arose in the first instance from an alien invasion and 

could not have been avoided through milder tactics.

 The existence of these dilemmas, and the unhappy choices they 

disclosed, were revealed in the confrontation between U.S. forces 

and insurgents in Fallujah after four American contractors were 

slain in April 2004. While public attention and criticism focused 

on the inconsistency of ordering a large attack and then calling it 

off after a massive outcry of Iraqi public opinion, the more basic 

point is that this inconsistent conduct arose out of the extremely 

disagreeable alternative that was presented. The same was true of 
18

the confrontation that ensued throughout southern Iraq after U.S. 

forces closed the newspaper of Moqtada al Sadr and attempted to 

arrest him, prompting widespread attacks from his followers from 

Baghdad to Basra. The U.S. objective of killing or capturing Sadr 

was abandoned in April, as it was in August, after the intervention 

of Ayatollah Sistani. Given the inconsistent conduct of U.S. forces 

in both instances, whereby they ultimately accepted what they had 

previously declared unacceptable, it would be difficult to defend 

the overall record, one of vacillation and inconstancy.48 But the 

record does underline the critical point: U.S. forces frequently found 

themselves in situations where they, not unreasonably, felt compelled 

to respond to provocation, but where the response imposed extreme 

political costs. The Fallujah operation after the November 2004 U.S. 

presidential election had the signal advantage of destroying many 

car-bomb factories, but it also drove 300,000 Sunnis from their homes 

and completely devastated the city. 

 The problems flowing from bad intelligence seem virtually 

endemic to the situation American forces confronted in Iraq. They 

were strangers in a strange land. They lacked the linguistic and 

cultural skills that might have defused misunderstandings, and, 

even had these been possessed in greater numbers, they would, 

as foreigners, have inevitably excited the suspicion and fear of the 

population they were garrisoning. These difficulties, moreover, 

would have existed even if American forces had been much larger 

in size. The assumption that the United States would have won the 

hearts and minds of the population had it maintained occupying 

forces of 300,000 as opposed to 140,000 must seem dubious in the 

extreme. Certain things could have done it better, like protecting 

critical infrastructure, securing arms depots, guarding borders, or 

processing prisoners, but the larger force would also have enabled 

the United States to do more things that would have inflamed rather 

than quelled the insurgency. 

Abolishing the Iraqi Army and Proscribing the Ba’athists.

 A persistent criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct of 

the Iraq war has focused on the political maladroitness with which 

it handled the Iraqis. The initial plan was for a rapid transfer of 
19

sovereignty to an indigenous Iraqi authority, probably headed by 

Ahmed Chalabi. It also assumed that the Iraqi army, shorn of its 

Ba’athist officers, would remain in existence. In the confusion and 

mayhem of post-liberation Iraq, however, the administration soon 

decided to install Paul Bremer as the pro-consul of the country and to 

shelve plans for a rapid transfer of sovereignty. One of the first acts of 

the CPA was to disband the Iraqi army, a measure complemented by 

a far-reaching proscription of the Ba’athists. Both measures elicited a 

great deal of criticism. 

 Unlike the various classes of Republican Guards or the irregular 

fedeyeen forces, say the critics, the army was a national institution. 

Several studies before the war—from the U.S. Army War College 

and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others—argued that 

an attempt should be made to negotiate with Iraqi units and use 

them as a force for maintaining order.49 In any event, however, the 

army simply disintegrated; bases were stripped bare by looters and 

rendered effectively unusable. The situation that confronted the CPA 

and Bremer was not that anticipated by any of the prewar studies. Like 

any other body whose head has been decapitated, this conscripted 

and ill-paid force (whose privates received the equivalent of $2 a 

month) was unlikely to be reconstituted without major surgery.50

 However much the reconstitution of the Iraqi army might appear 

as a kind of deus ex machina to stem the immense disorder of occupied 

Iraq, it is doubtful whether it could have done so. At best, we have a 

series of unanswered questions regarding who might have officered 

the force, the functions it would have performed, and its political 

orientation and reliability.51 Because it simply dissolved in the course 

of major combat operations, it would have been useless to stem the 

first tide of anarchy and looting. Though often described as “highly 

trained,” it was not trained for the policing and peacekeeping tasks 

most urgently needed in the new Iraq. It is now regularly said that 

the program to train Iraqi police, national guard, and army forces has 

been beset by incompetence and mismanagement, and undoubtedly 

the United States did not give this task the high-level attention it 

deserved, farming it out in the first instance to private contractors.52

These limited results, however, may simply reflect the profound 

difficulties in seeking to train Iraqis to serve a foreign master. In 
20

effect, the CPA ruled out using the various militias, such as the 

“Badr Brigades” of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution 

in Iraq (SCIRI), holding that the existence of these militias was a 

threat to the integrity of the Iraqi state. However reasonable the 

fear of fractionalization and civil war that lay behind this attitude, 

it also underlined the artificial character of the national forces the 

United States sought to build, and could not but foster the suspicion 

among recruits that they were being asked to fight for objectives not 

their own. Until fall 2004, when a handful of Iraqi units—largely of 

Kurdish and Shia composition—began participating in American 

operations, the uniform record was the unreliability of all classes 

of Iraqi forces—police, national guard, army. There is no reason for 

thinking that the same difficulty would not have arisen with respect 

to a reconstituted Iraqi army, and the inauspicious results from the 

creation of the “Fallujah brigade” after the retreat of American forces 

from the city in April 2004 provides telling evidence on this score. 

It is, in any case, difficult to think of a preceding case in which an 

invader sought to rely upon the army it defeated for the maintenance 

of order, and one should not exclude the possibility that U.S. forces 

would have been providing arms and equipment to forces thoroughly 

infiltrated by the insurgency. 

 These reflections are not inconsistent with the view that the 

manner in which the disbanding of the army took place was a 

mistake. Bremer initially disbanded the force without pay and later 

felt compelled to rescind that decision so as to stifle the anger it 

caused. Certainly there was nothing to be gained from any measure 

smacking of a gratuitous humiliation, but that does not mean that 

a reconstituted army would have acted as a loyal servant of the 

occupation. Given the U.S. experience with forces that have been 

vetted and trained, this seems altogether unlikely.

 A broader question may be raised with respect to the political 

strategy that the CPA followed during its brief existence. If there 

was a simple formula by which a coherent political strategy may 

be expressed, it was to communicate to the Shia that they would, 

as the majority group, quickly gain power through free elections; to 

reassure the Sunni that, despite losing their historic dominance over 

Iraq, they would not be subject to persecution; and to persuade the 
21

Kurds to cooperate in the maintenance of the Iraqi state and to rest 

content with an autonomous status short of independence. In fact, the 

American occupiers did not consistently pursue any such logic. The 

proscription of the Ba’athists, many of whom had joined the party 

as a condition of employment, was inconsistent with this strategy 

and was partially reversed when the Allawi interim government 

took power in summer 2004. The Ba’athist proscription, together 

with the incessant raids in the Sunni triangle, virtually eliminated 

the prospect of reconciling the Sunnis to the new order. At the same 

time, the CPA took some measures that also seriously disaffected 

the Shia. The most important (and least defensible) of these steps 

was the cancellation of local elections, a measure taken because it 

was thought that the best organized forces would be the Islamist 

parties.53 The CPA also adopted a seven-step constitutional process 

whereby free elections would only take place at the end of a 2-year 

process drawing up a new constitution. Opposing a quick transfer of 

sovereignty to the Iraqis, Bremer told a congressional committee in 

August 2003 that:

No appointed government, not even one as honest and dedicated as the 

Iraqi Governing Council, can have the legitimacy necessary today to take 

on the difficult issues Iraqis face as they write their constitution and elect 

a government. The only path to full Iraqi sovereignty is through a written 

constitution, ratified and followed by free, democratic elections.54

The CPA seemed to communicate, by its opposition to any immediate 

elections, a distrust of the likely political leadership the Shia would 

produce. 

 Since the Americans, under duress from Sistani, ultimately 

reversed themselves on the question of transferring sovereignty 

to a UN-appointed interim government and also speeded up the 

electoral calendar they originally had envisioned, it seems difficult 

to defend the United States against the charge that it was doing in 

fall 2004 what it ought to have been doing the year previously—

namely, playing a supporting role to an appointed but sovereign 

Iraqi government that enjoyed international recognition and was 

moving as rapidly as possible to nationwide elections. It is useful 

to remember, however, that the original rationale of the CPA, in 
22

wishing to delay the transfer of sovereignty until elections were 

held under a new constitution, was that an appointed government 

would lack legitimacy. Having changed its mind in the interim, the 

U.S. Government subsequently spoke in an entirely different vein, 

but its original skepticism was true enough. The Allawi government 

enjoyed greater legitimacy than the CPA, but that is not to say that it 

really possessed legitimacy itself. On the contrary, it was profoundly 

handicapped, as any such government would be, by the circumstance 

that it could not stand without U.S. assistance but its dependence on 

such assistance compromised its nationalist credentials in the eyes of 

the Iraqi public.

 In detail, these criticisms of the U.S. course—that it needlessly 

persecuted the Ba’athists, that it sowed suspicion among the Shia, and 

that it flaunted rather than sought to minimize its leading role in the 

occupation, even as against its own appointed Governing Council—

all have merit. At the same time, the more fundamental truth is that 

the United States had thrust itself into the middle of a bitterly divided 

society. To find a successful political strategy in these circumstances 

required the skill of an equilibrist and a substantial amount of sheer 

good luck; even then, it may simply have been impossible. The 

proscription of Ba’athists undoubtedly appeared as unnecessarily 

punitive to the Sunni, but to the Shia and the Kurds, it was justice 

delayed but not denied. That is why Ahmed Chalabi, angling for 

a leading position among the Shia, was in favor of that step. Nor 

should we exaggerate the significance of the Ba’athist proscription in 

fostering ill-will among the Sunni toward the U.S. occupation. There 

was plenty of that created by the invasion itself, by the dislodgment 

of Sunni elites that it implied, and by the measures pursued to track 

down Ba’athists and to battle the insurgency. It was a perfectly 

defensible piece of constitutional engineering that the Kurds were in 

effect allotted a veto over any new constitution, but the Shia did not 

accept the justice of this provision of the Transitional Administrative 

Law (TAL) and pointed out, in terms almost Lincolnesque, that no 

majority could consent to being ruled indefinitely by a minority.55

Ultimately, the problem was that there was no apparent way to split 

the difference between groups whose aims were, in the final analysis, 

irreconcilable. 
23

 These considerations do not support the conclusion that the course 

chosen by the United States was inevitable or that the insurgency had 

to take the form that it did. Had the United States pursued a different 

course—narrowing to a small group the number of Ba’athists who 

would be proscribed; seeking to rejuvenate the old institutions of the 

Iraqi state, especially the army; encouraging rather than canceling 

local elections; moving speedily toward the appointment, with the 

UN’s blessing, of an interim but sovereign government—a different 

set of consequences from those actually experienced might well 

have occurred. Though such a course was unlikely, given the overall 

character of the war, the more endemic problem is that measures 

friendly to the Sunni would have caused serious trouble within the 

Shia communities whose cooperation was indispensable for the 

success of the American effort. For an indeterminate but probably 

substantial number of insurgents (certainly the foreign jihadists 

and also many of the Salafist and Wahabi Sunnis), for whom the 

infidel invasion was itself the most serious sin, it is doubtful that 

their determination to resist by arms the U.S. occupation would have 

been altered by these measures. At most such measures would have 

made it more difficult for this class of insurgents to find refuge and 

support in Sunni areas of the country, but some of these steps would 

also have increased the likelihood of a Shia insurgency. Indeed, if 

more conciliatory gestures toward the Sunni had been paired with 

aggressive moves to disarm the Shia militias, the dangers of a Shia 

insurgency would have been very considerably enhanced. Splitting 

the difference between rival groups is a logical strategy in polities 

accustomed to resolving conflicts through tolerance, negotiation, 

compromise, and restraint, but where irreconcilable demands exist, 

the result of this method may simply be to alienate both sides.56

 The January 2005 elections did not overcome these various 

schisms. The elections were important because they provided the 

Shia with a sense of political ownership that dulls, for them, the sharp 

edges of the American occupation. In addition, the new government, 

even if hobbled by division and threats of breakdown, seems likely 

to provide a boost to organizing Shia military power. But though 

the election results will enable the Shia to fight a civil war with 

the Sunni more effectively (with the Kurds potentially in mortal 

conflict with one or both of the others), the election does not ward 
24

off the prospect of continuing and endemic violence. That requires a 

political settlement whose formula still seems elusive. The elections 

were not considered legitimate by the Sunni, who by and large did 

not participate and who seem unlikely to submit to their effective 

disenfranchisement. The confrontation in the North between Kurds, 

who wish to control Kirkuk, and the Arabs and Turkmen, who wish 

to see it under the control of the Iraqi state, has been delayed by the 

Kurds’ desire not to offend the United States, but it remains likely 

that ultimately the conflict, pitting irreconcilable claims against 

one another, will be resolved by arms. Much as we must hope that 

an Iraqi leader will emerge with the wisdom to reconcile these 

contradictory aspirations, the historical record is not auspicious. In 

ethnically heterogeneous countries, democratization has often been 

followed by secession and civil war. In the depressing but probably 

accurate formulation of James Kurth, “one could have an Iraq, but 

without democracy. Alternatively, one could have democracy, but 

without an Iraq. But one could not have both.”57

Lessons. 

 The principal purpose of this monograph has been to cast doubt 

on the assumption that the United States squandered an historic 

opportunity to reconstruct the Iraqi state through mind-numbing 

incompetence. In reviewing the decisions of the Bush administration, 

to be sure, one can certainly question a good number of them. But if in 

detail the criticisms make considerable sense, the overall tenor of the 

argument is very misleading. The basic problems the United States 

has confronted flowed from the enterprise itself and not primarily 

from mistakes in execution along the way. “The war itself was the 

original sin,” as one senior diplomat from the region observed. 

“When you commit a sin as cardinal as that, you are bound to get 

a lot of things wrong.” He illustrated the point, aptly, as follows: 

“When you enter a one-way street in the wrong direction, no matter 

which way you turn, you will be entering all the other streets in the 

wrong way.”58

 This conclusion should not be seen as absolving civilian and 

military war planners from responsibility for the choices that were 

made. It does argue, however, for a greater measure of realism 
25

regarding the constraints under which U.S. officials operated, and 

the sheer difficulty of the problems that were faced. Even if a larger 

invading force had had an operational plan sensitive to the likelihood 

that anarchy would follow rapidly from the decapitation of the Iraqi 

state, it still would have been extremely difficult to prevent most 

of the large-scale looting and rampant criminality that descended 

on the country. Even had American forces understood that they 

were likely to face a growing insurgency after the war, it is doubtful 

that they could have elaborated an effective strategy for defeating it 

quickly, if at all. Given the extreme pressures that have been placed 

on active and reserve forces in maintaining a force of 140,000 troops, 

retrospective judgments that more forces should have been sent 

at the beginning and throughout appear unrealistic, as do the oftheard calls for more international forces from countries that have 

been keenly looking for a good excuse not to send them to Iraq since 

the war began. A realistic appreciation of the manifold problems 

that would arise from the invasion of the country actually pointed 

to the conclusion that Iraq ought not to have been invaded and 

“liberated” at all. As Fallows observes, the most prescient warnings 

that emerged within the bureaucracy over the hazards entailed by 

the Iraq invasion did come from those who opposed the enterprise. 

In the nature of things, this made it very difficult for the architects of 

the invasion to take such warnings seriously.

 Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was, in basic respects, a test of the 

theory that civilians must intervene in the military planning process 

and force their perspectives down the chain of command.59 Secretary 

Rumsfeld did this in the first instance by starting the bidding for the 

forces committed to the invasion at 75,000 troops and intimating that 

a smaller number would be entirely adequate. Events have shown 

that the number was ludicrously small in relation to the tasks given 

to U.S. forces, and that Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was 

right in seeing the need for much larger numbers. On this crucial 

question, certainly, the record of Iraq war planning does nothing 

to advance the case for civilian activism. Even if the indictment of 

Secretary Rumsfeld is accepted, however, the case of the critics is 

not thereby confirmed. Taken at face value, that case amounts to the 

proposition that there was a smart and a dumb way of going about 
26

the demolition and reconstruction of the Iraqi state, and that the 

Bush administration, blinded by ideology, chose the latter course. 

A more appropriate lesson is that there are certain intrinsic limits to 

what military power can accomplish that both defenders and critics 

of the administration’s course of action have ignored. “Policy must 

know the instrument it is to employ,” says Clausewtiz in one of his 

enduring formulations. For certain purposes, like the creation of a 

liberal democratic society that will be a model for others, it seems 

fair to conclude that military power is a blunt instrument, destined 

by its very nature to give rise to unintended and unwelcome 

consequences.60

 It is notable, indeed, that the argument over “what went wrong” 

has seldom, if at all, brought into question the tactics employed by 

U.S. forces, but there was, in fact, a deep contradiction between 

the democracy the United States said it was trying to build and the 

methods it employed to battle the insurgency. Democracy, as it is 

commonly understood, is about more than free and fair elections. 

It requires “independent courts, equality before the law, and 

constitutional limits on the powers of government. It establishes 

independent institutions to control and punish corruption and abuse 

of power.” No one in a democracy “may be arrested, imprisoned, or 

exiled arbitrarily. No one may be denied freedom without a fair and 

public hearing by an impartial court.”61 Such restraints, however, 

had no bearing on the conduct of U.S. military forces, whose actions 

were governed formally by the law of armed conflict rather than the 

protection of individual rights typical of constitutional democracies. 

The U.S. military relied on military intelligence, often defective, 

rather than judicial warrants to conduct raids and pursue suspects. It 

arrested and imprisoned many individuals without even a pretense 

of fair and public hearings by impartial courts and often left family 

members with no knowledge of the whereabouts of their kin or 

the charges brought against them. There were few constitutional 

restraints on U.S. actions, and none reachable by Iraqi authorities. 

For all the effort that American officials put into enshrining various 

individual rights in the TAL, the United States was equally insistent 

that the restraints on governmental power that the TAL incorporated 

did not apply to the coalition forces that actually held the police and 
27

military power in the country. Even if the plea is accepted that such 

measures were permitted by the laws of war and justified on grounds 

of military necessity, the flouting of such requirements by U.S. forces 

could not but undercut the U.S. case for democracy. Such conduct 

communicated to Iraqis that, while limitations on the power of the 

state ought to be enshrined in the constitution, they might easily be 

brushed aside by the appeal to national security.62

 However Iraq ends, the lessons drawn from the experience are 

likely to be very important for the American government. Probably 

the most likely lesson is that agencies and departments of the U.S. 

Government and military need to be recast to fight another such 

war successfully. Some suggest that the United States should beef 

up its “nation-building” expertise, perhaps creating a cabinet level 

department charged with “reconstruction and stabilization.” Others 

argue that the army, having gotten out of the counterinsurgency 

business after Vietnam, needs to devote far more emphasis to training 

its forces to conduct those missions. A different conclusion would be 

to devise a national security strategy in which there is no imperative 

to fight the kind of war that the United States has fought in Iraq. 

Rather than “do it better next time,” the contrary lesson would be 

on the order of “don’t do it at all.” There is, to be sure, a basic virtue 

in what political scientist Samuel Huntington has called “strategic 

pluralism.” Since threats are unpredictable, it stands to reason that 

a wide variety of capabilities, including redundancies in various 

service arms, is a virtue in national security strategy. Undoubtedly, 

too, U.S. forces may be called upon again to participate in operations 

to reconstruct “failed states,” and U.S. forces need to think about 

how to do this intelligently. But consideration also needs to be given 

to the counterargument that developing a wide range of capabilities 

increases the likelihood that they will be used for unnecessary 

enterprises. 

 Another lesson would be to insist on more realism in war planning 

projections. We have seen that politically unrealistic assumptions 

regarding the potential contribution of allied forces entered strongly 

into the war planning process during the prelude to the Iraq war, 

with the diplomacy of war preparation badly out of sync with the 

assumptions of the military planners. Ironically, OSD’s decision to 

pare the size of the invasion force, though justly criticized, had the 
28

unforeseen benefit of leaving sufficient reserves in the system to deal 

with a protracted campaign. Had the United States invaded with 

the 400,000 forces initially foreseen at the beginning of the military 

planning process, U.S. forces would have been placed under severe 

strain, and it is not evident how the challenge would have been met. 

The severe pressures placed on Army Reserve and National Guard 

forces by the Iraq campaign—including the odious expedient of the 

“backdoor draft”—necessitate a rethinking of the entire system for 

the recruitment and retention of ground forces.63

 Finally, the military services—including but not limited to the 

Army—must digest again the lesson that “war is an instrument of 

policy.” The use of force must be guided by the imperative that it is 

to serve a political aim. The profound neglect given to reestablishing 

order in the military’s prewar planning and the facile assumption 

that operations critical to the overall success of the campaign were 

“somebody else’s business” reflect a shallow view of warfare. The 

American war plan, far from being “the most brilliant in modern 

American military history,” was, in crucial respects, not directed at 

the main political object: ensuring a successful reconstruction. It did 

not look toward “the day after” in a way that recognized the most 

serious problems that would face the United States after the collapse 

of the Iraqi regime. 

 This was not simply a failure of “intelligence” but one of 

“strategic culture”—the tendency, that is, for war planners, both 

civilian and military, to be “obsessed with stupendous deeds of fire 

and movement” rather than the political functions that war must 

serve.64 That proclivity has many dimensions, from theories of 

“shock and awe” in the Air Force and OSD to the aversion to policing 

and peacekeeping functions in the Army. Though the aversion to 

occupation duties did not and could not survive the encounter with 

Iraqi realities, the duties were carried out in a fashion—with the 

imperatives of “force protection” overriding concern for Iraqi civilian 

casualties—that risked sacrificing the broader strategic mission of 

U.S. forces.65 Like other failures of the U.S. mission in Iraq, this, too, 

has an air of inevitability about it. But civilian and military leaders 

need to ask themselves whether such a bargain is good for the nation 

and consistent with the professional ethic that soldiers are obligated 

to obey. 
29

ENDNOTES

 1. An earlier version of this monograph appeared in Survival, Vol. 47, Summer 

2005, pp. 7-31.

 2. Peter Grier, “The Rising Economic Cost of the Iraq War,” Christian Science 

Monitor, May 19, 2005, reports that Congress has approved $192 billion for the Iraq 

war and that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that total costs might 

rise as high as $600 billion by 2010. According to a former Pentagon comptroller 

cited in Grier’s report, current operations in Iraq run about $5 billion a month. 

Special appropriations only cover incremental costs (such as combat pay) and 

exclude soldiers’ regular pay and other items such as future health care benefits, 

so there remains considerable room for argument with respect to the “real” costs 

of the war. 

 3. Frederick D. Barton and Bathsheba N. Crocker, Capturing Iraqi Voices, 

Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2004. See also 

from the Brookings Institution the regularly updated “Iraq Index: Tracking 

Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq,” at http://www.brookings.edu/

iraqindex.

 4. Chatham House Briefing Paper, Iraq in Transition: Vortex or Catalyst, 

London: Chatham House, September 2004; Douglas Jehl, “U.S. Intelligence Shows 

Pessimism on Iraq’s Future,” New York Times, September 16, 2004. 

 5. “As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his 

army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq 

is a failure of planning and implementation.” David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess,” 

New York Times, November 2, 2003. “In planning for a war to topple Saddam,” 

notes Niall Ferguson, “Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did a brilliant job. But in 

planning for the peace that would follow, he did a dreadful job.” “Recovering Our 

Nerve,” The National Interest, Vol. 76, Summer 2004, p. 52. 

 6. James Fallows, “Blind into Baghdad,” The Atlantic Monthly, January/

February 2004, p. 72. See also David L. Phillips, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar 

Reconstruction Fiasco, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2005.

 7. Richard Lowry, “What Went Wrong? The Miscalculations and Missteps that 

Led to the Current Situation in Iraq,” National Review, October 25, 2004, pp. 34-44. 

 8. Larry Diamond, quoted in Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Mistakes Loom Large 

as Handover Nears,” Washington Post, June 20, 2004. See further Larry Diamond, 

Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy 

to Iraq, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005.

 9. Larry Diamond, “What Went Wrong in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, 

September/October 2004, p. 34. 

 10. For a suggestive analysis, see Lawrence Freedman, “Rumsfeld’s Legacy: 

The Iraq Syndrome?” Washington Post, January 9, 2005. The argument over Iraq 

also parallels the argument over Vietnam in certain respects. Conservative writers 
30

have been attracted to the proposition that overwhelming strength might have 

won the war, and that failure was the result of civilian leaders tying the hands of 

the military. Liberal authors, by contrast, stress the incoherence of the war plans 

developed by U.S. military leaders and emphasize, for example, the importance 

of population security. Underlying each of these attitudes are contrary theories 

about how the world works that show real persistence over time. 

 11. James Dobbins, quoted in Robin Wright, “Series of U.S. Fumbles Blamed 

for Turmoil in Postwar Iraq,” Washington Post, April 11, 2004.

 12. See the incisive analysis of these interrelationships in Diamond, “What 

Went Wrong.”

 13. George Packer, “War After the War: What Washington Doesn’t See in 

Iraq,” The New Yorker, November 24, 2003. See also John Lee Anderson, The Fall of 

Baghdad, New York: Penguin, 2004.

 14. Quoted in Andrew J. Bacevich, “Balkan Ghosts: Mistakes of the Clinton 

Team, Mistakes of the Bush Team,” National Review, April 21, 2003. 

 15. As of June 10, 2005, according to official figures at http://icasualties.org/oif/. 

 16. For the significance of this key choice—“to win or not to lose”—in a variety 

of conflicts, see Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, 

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1966, pp. 30-40. 

 17. Edward Cody, “In Iraq, Showdown Looms Over Self-Rule for Kurds,” 

Washington Post, July 11, 2004. See also George Packer, “The Next Iraqi War: What 

Kirkuk’s Struggle to Reverse Saddam’s Ethnic Cleansing Signals for the Future of 

Iraq,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2004. 

 18. On the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s (CPA) economic 

reconstruction plan, especially the lack of progress in overcoming high levels 

of Iraqi unemployment, see John Doe, “Mismanaging Iraq: The Economics of 

Insurgency,” The National Interest, Vol. 78, Winter 2004/05, pp. 108-113. One 

CPA official noted that the “primary beneficiaries” of the $18.6 billion granted by 

Congress “will be American companies” and will employ foreign workers instead 

of Iraqis. Chandrasekaran, “Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears.” Irrational 

as this was from the standpoint of winning the war, such a focus—dictated by 

domestic political considerations—may also be considered nearly inevitable. 

 19. Lawrence F. Kaplan, “The Last Casualty,” The New Republic, February 7, 

2005, pp. 17-21. For an especially poignant example, see Elizabeth Rubin, “Fern 

Holland’s War,” New York Times, September 19, 2004. 

 20. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, General John 

Keane, who served as Army Vice Chief of Staff during the invasion, remarked of 

the insurgency that “we didn’t see it coming. And we were not properly prepared 

and organized to deal with it. . . . Many of us got seduced by the Iraqi exiles in 

terms of what the outcome would be.” Keane told the committee, his hands spread 

wide, “This represents the space for the intellectual capital that we expended to 

take the regime down.” And then drawing two fingers nearly together to reveal 
31

just a small gap, Keane added, “This represents the space for the intellectual 

capital to deal with it after. I mean, that was the reality of it.” Cited in Stephen 

J. Hedges, “Former General Says U.S. Military Didn’t Expect Iraqi Insurgency,” 

Chicago Tribune, July 15, 2004. 

 21. Diamond, “What Went Wrong,” pp. 35-36.

 22. These conclusions were reached in a military briefing prepared before 

the war for the UN National Security Council called “Force Security in Seven 

Recent Stability Operations.” See Michael R. Gordon, “‘Catastrophic Success’: The 

Strategy to Secure Iraq did not Foresee a 2nd War,” New York Times, October 19, 

2004. On historic force-to-population ratios, see also James Dobbins, America’s Role 

in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 

2003. 

 23. Fallows, “Blind into Baghdad,” p. 64; Gordon, “Catastrophic Success,” New 

York Times, October 19, 2004. 

 24. See Interview with James Perito, “Truth, War, and Consequences,” 

Frontline, Public Broadcasting System, October 2003, at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/

pages/frontline/shows/truth/interviews/perito.html.

 25. Farnaz Fassihi, “For Iraqi Family, A Torturous Search For Detained Kin; 

Overwhelmed U.S. Military Can’t Track Everyone Arrested in Security Raids, 

Inciting Iraqis’ Rage,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2003. See also Robin Wright 

and Thomas E. Ricks, “Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels: Ex-Overseer of Iraq Says 

U.S. Effort Was Hampered Early On,” Washington Post, October 5, 2004. “We never 

had enough troops on the ground,” Bremer noted. “The single most important 

change—the one thing that would have improved the situation—would have been 

having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout” the occupation.

 26. Michael E. O’Hanlon, “Iraq Without a Plan,” Policy Review, Vol. 128, 

December 2004/January 2005.

 27. Thomas E. White, then Secretary of the Army, notes that “Our working 

budgetary assumption was that 90 days after completion of the operation, we 

would withdraw the first 50,000 and then every 30 days we’d take out another 

50,000 until everybody was back. The view was that whatever was left in Iraq 

would be de minimis.” Quoted in Gordon, “Catastrophic Success: The Strategy to 

Secure Iraq did not Foresee a 2nd War,” New York Times, October 19, 2004. 

 28. Nelson, quoted in Matthew Hay Brown and Tamara Lytle, “Questions 

Mount on Whether Iraq Is Becoming a Quagmire,” Orlando Sentinel, April 7, 2004. 

See also Robert E. Hunter, “The Perfect Army for Iraq: NATO,” New York Times, 

September 13, 2003. 

 29. On U.S. justifications for the Iraq war, see especially Ivo H. Daalder 

and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, 

Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2003; and Jeffrey Record, Dark Victory: 

America’s Second War Against Iraq, Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 2004.
32

 30. For the firestorm in allied opinion, see Elizabeth Pond, Friendly Fire: The 

Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 

2004.

 31. See Thalif Deen, “UN Unions Want Workers Out of Iraq,” Inter Press Service, 

October 7, 2004. 

 32. For allied contributions, see especially a regularly updated listing of 

GlobalSecurity.org at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat_coalition.

htm. 

 33. Quoted in John F. Burns, “The Iraqi Capital; Baghdad Residents Begin a 

Long Climb To an Ordered City,” New York Times, April 14, 2003.

 34. No American official explicitly condoned the looting, which would have 

violated U.S. responsibilities under the laws of war. Nevertheless, U.S. officials 

did see the looters as striking at “the symbols of the regime,” in Rumsfeld’s words, 

and professed understanding of their “pent-up feelings.” Transcript of Pentagon 

Briefing, New York Times, April 11, 2003. Noting the psychological difficulty of 

acting against looters, one defense official later commented: “It’s like sending 

troops into Warsaw Square to arrest people for being too unruly in 1989.” Quoted 

in Lowry, “What Went Wrong,” p. 37. 

 35. Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess.”

 36. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Our Heritage is Finished,” Washington Post, April 

13, 2003; Greg Gugliotta, “Pentagon was Told of Risk to Museums,” Washington 

Post, April 14, 2003; Fallows, “Blind into Baghdad”; Lowry, “What Went Wrong”; 

Rieff, “Blueprint.” 

 37. Thomas E. Ricks, “Army Historian Cites Lack of Postwar Plan; Major 

Calls Effort in Iraq ‘Mediocre’,” Washington Post, December 25, 2004, citing an 

unpublished study of Major Isaiah Wilson III. See also R. Jeffrey Smith, “Now 

for Nation Change,” Washington Post, April 13, 2003, quoting Sandra Mitchell, 

a veteran of peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia: “What 

we’re seeing is almost an acceptance of the situation—that we’re not going to be 

the cops.” 

 38. As is clearly implied, for instance, by James Fallows, “Blind into Baghdad,” 

pp. 64-65.

 39. “As early as January, according to Newsweek, the Iraqi secret police issued 

an order instructing its forces to ‘do what’s necessary after the fall of the Iraqi 

leadership to the American-British-Zionist Coalition forces,’ and setting out 11 

steps, among them, ‘looting and burning all the government institutions that 

belong to our Directorates and other ones,’ and sowing chaos in the country by 

sabotaging power plants and assassinating imams and other public figures.” Mark 

Danner, “Iraq: The New War,” The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003; 

Scott Johnson and Evan Thomas, “Still Fighting Saddam,” Newsweek, July 21, 

2003. 
33

 40. Lowry, “What Went Wrong,” p. 36, quoting Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman 

General Richard Myers, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 

2004, that “I would submit we were probably too gracious in our victory in 

hindsight.” 

 41. The Duelfer report provides evidence that Saddam Hussein expected 

and planned for some form of insurgency against the coalition. See Douglas 

Jehl, “Inspector’s Report Says Hussein Expected Guerrilla War,” New York Times, 

October 7, 2004. 

 42. Michael E. O’Hanlon, “Iraq without a Plan,” Policy Review, Vol. 128, 

2004/05.

 43. While not anticipating an insurgency, U.S. planners did anticipate that 

Saddam would attempt to destroy the oil fields and otherwise adopt some version 

of a scorched-earth policy, possibly through the use of WMD. In any event, notes 

Stephen Biddle, “the Iraqis had neither prepared their infrastructure for destruction 

on more than a token scale nor were they in the process of doing so, either before 

the war or during the fighting.” Biddle notes a variety of possible explanations 

for such lack of preparation, “ranging from disobedience by oil field workers to 

organizational incompetence in the Iraqi military to a lack of intent at the highest 

levels.” See Statement by Stephen Biddle, Committee on Armed Services, U.S. 

House of Representatives, 1st Session, 108th Congress, October 21, 2003, pp. 6-8.

 44. For reports of this practice, see, e.g, “When Deadly Force Bumps into 

Hearts and Minds,” The Economist, December 29, 2004; Dan Baum, “Two Soldiers: 

How the Dead Come Home,” The New Yorker, August 9, 2004; Patrick Cockburn, 

“Despair in Iraq Over the Forgotten Victims of U.S. Invasion,” The Independent, 

September 9, 2004. See also Sean Rayment, “US Tactics Condemned by British 

Officers,” The Telegraph, November 4, 2004, quoting a senior British army official: 

My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the 

Americans’ use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive 

to the threat they are facing. They don’t see the Iraqi people the way we 

see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned 

about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude 

towards the Iraqis is tragic, it’s awful. The U.S. troops view things in very 

simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between 

who supports what and who doesn’t in Iraq. It’s easier for their soldiers 

to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is 

bandit country and everybody is out to kill them.

On the civilian toll in Iraq, see Nancy A. Youssef, “More Iraqi Civilians Killed by 

U.S. Forces than by Insurgents, Data Shows,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, September 

24, 2004. 

 45. Jim Krane, Associated Press, “U.S. Faces Complex Insurgency in Iraq,” 

Duluth News Tribune, October 4, 2004.

 46. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, “Estimates by U.S. See More Rebels With 

More Funds,” New York Times, October 22, 2004; Tom Lasseter and Jonathan S. 
34

Landay, “Iraqi Insurgency Growing Larger, More Effective,” January 21, 2005, 

Knight Ridder. 

 47. For one example among many press reports, see Jackie Spinner, “In One 

Night, Iraqi Turns from Friend to Foe: Man Who Supported U.S. Occupation Calls 

Americans ‘the Devil’ After Alleged Raid on House,” Washington Post, January 

23, 2005. A more comprehensive account of this dynamic may be found in Carl 

Conneta, Vicious Circle: The Dynamics of Occupation and Resistance in Iraq, Part One. 

Patterns of Popular Discontent, Cambridge, MA: Project on Defense Alternatives 

Research Monograph #10, May 18, 2005.

 48. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Key General Criticizes April Attack In Fallujah; 

Abrupt Withdrawal Called Vacillation,” Washington Post, September 13, 2004.

 49. Edward P. Djerejian, et al., Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict Policy 

in Iraq, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2003; Conrad C. Crane and W. 

Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military 

Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army 

War College, February 2003. 

 50. For a defense of the move, see L. Paul Bremer, “The Right Call,” The Wall 

Street Journal, January 12, 2005.

 51. Michael R. Gordon, “Debate Lingering on Decision to Dissolve the Iraqi 

Military,” New York Times, October 21, 2004. 

 52. For a particularly harsh critique, see Anthony H. Cordesman, “US Policy 

in Iraq: A ‘Realist’ Approach to its Challenges and Opportunities,” Washington, 

DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 6, 2004. See also Bryan 

Bender, “Report Paints Bleak Picture of Iraqi Forces,” Boston Globe, January 8, 2005; 

and Sabrina Tavernise and John F. Burns, “As Iraqi Army Trains, Word in the 

Field Is It May Take Years,” New York Times, June 13, 2005. 

 53. William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Occupation Forces Halt 

Elections Throughout Iraq,” Washington Post, June 28, 2003. 

 54. Quoted in Associated Press, “Bush plans U.N. address,” Daily Herald, 

September 23, 2003. As Bush described the anticipated process in 2003: “The 

U.N. resolution must promote an orderly transfer of sovereignty to what will 

be a freely elected government, based upon a constitution. . . . The constitution 

must be written, and there will be free elections, and then sovereignty will occur 

once the Iraqi people are able to express their opinions.” Quoted in “Bush plans 

personal appeal on Iraq,” MSNBC, September 19, 2003. To similar effect, see the 

comments of Condoleeza Rice: “The French plan, which would somehow try to 

transfer sovereignty to an unelected group of people, just isn’t workable,” she said 

at the White House briefing. “It’s a country that needs an orderly process to get to 

the writing of a constitution . . . followed then by elections and then by the transfer 

of sovereignty.” Quoted in Joseph Curl, “U.S. Says French Plan for Iraq Won’t 

Work,” The Washington Times, September 23, 2003. 

 55. Charles Clover, “Clash over ‘Kurdish veto’ looms in Iraq,” Financial Times, 

February 19-20, 2005. The Shia, at Sistani’s insistence, were successful in removing 
35

any reference to the new constitution when the UN Security Council gave its 

imprimatur to the new Allawi government. See Peter W. Galbraith, “Iraq: The 

Bungled Transition,” New York Review of Books, September 23, 2004. 

 56. See, especially, Diamond, Squandered Victory, pp. 211-245, for 

recommendations that pair a more conciliatory strategy toward the Sunni with 

measures to which many Shia would have taken great umbrage—especially 

calls to disarm the militias of Moktada al Sadr, SCIRI, and Dawa. Though such a 

move was strongly favored by some Shia in the south, an attempt to disarm these 

militias by force would have greatly heightened the probability of widespread 

Shia insurrections throughout the southern part of Iraq. As Diamond concedes, the 

United States did not in any case have the requisite number of forces to undertake 

a showdown with them. Given the limited results of the U.S. campaign against 

Sadr, the conclusion is irresistible that the wiser course was the political solution 

recommended by the much-maligned Ahmed Chalabi: “Our real business,” as 

Chalabi noted, “is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside 

and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to 

eat them up.” Quoted in Dexter Filkins, “Militant Cleric Considers Entry Into Iraqi 

Politics,” New York Times, October 3, 2004. 

 57. James Kurth, “Iraq: Losing the American Way,” The American Conservative, 

March 15, 2004, p. 16. See also the suggestive analysis of Amy Chua, World on Fire: 

How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, 

New York, 2004.

 58. This was the reply of a regional diplomat who had been queried on the 

grand question: “What went wrong?” Quoted in Diamond, Squandered Victory, p. 

280. Diamond takes a different view in his book, but concedes that “the hardest 

issue I had to struggle with was my interlocutor’s assertion of ‘original sin’,” p. 

281.

 59. Cf. Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in 

Wartime, New York: Free Press, 2002. 

 60. The civil-military dispute over Iraq carries distinct echoes of the grand 

argument over Vietnam. Then, the military blamed Robert McNamara for overriding 

its professional judgment, tying its hands, and preventing it from elaborating a 

strategy that would have won the war. Alternatives included the unrestricted use 

of airpower, “isolating the battlefield,” and fighting effective counterinsurgency by 

ensuring population security. Today, military critics point to officious interference 

by Rumsfeld in matters—e.g., the number of troops required to garrison effectively 

an occupied country—that fell within the military’s professional expertise and 

whose wrong decision by the Secretary of Defense badly prejudiced the likely 

success of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. In both cases, it is not difficult to make 

out a strong indictment of the civilian planners. Also in both cases, however, it 

is rather more difficult to defend the alternative offered by the military or even, 

given its divided mind and its reluctance to challenge civilian authority, to have 

a clear idea of what that alternative was. Rather than demonstrating the superior 

wisdom of the contending sides in the perennial dispute over the boundaries of 
36

civil-military relations, both episodes are prime illustrations of the limitations of 

military power and the disutility of force. 

 61. These passages come from the explanations to Iraqis of the requisites of 

democratic government given by Larry Diamond when an advisor to the CPA in 

early 2004, as recounted in Diamond, Squandered Victory, pp. 106, 111.

 62. Feisal Istrabadi, who was intimately involved with the negotiations over 

the TAL, recounted the U.S. stance thusly: “The American position was that they 

did not want any restriction on their movements. And they wanted to make it 

clear that the Bill of Rights only applied to the Iraqi government. Only the Iraqi 

government would need an arrest warrant; the multinational force could break 

down doors.” Quoted in ibid., p. 161. See also p. 199.

 63. Bradley Graham, “General Says Army Reserve Is Becoming a ‘Broken’ 

Force,” The Washington Post, January 6, 2005.

 64. Eliot A. Cohen, “A Time for Humility,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 

2005. To similar effect, see Frederick W. Kagan, “War and Aftermath,” Policy 

Review, Vol. 120, August/September 2003; and Antulio J. Echevarria II, Toward 

an American Way of War, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War 

College, 2004. 

 65. On the alienation of Iraqi opinion entailed by U.S. “force protection” tactics, 

see the citations in note 42 above; Richard C. Paddock, “Killing of Civilians by U.S. 

Troops Angers Iraqi Government,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2005; Robert F. 

Worth, “For Some in Iraq’s Sunni Minority, A Growing Sense of Alienation,” New 

York Times, May 8, 2005; and Tom Lasseter, “In Iraq, Efforts to Catch Militants Fuel 

Rage, Fear,” Detroit Free Press, May 24, 2005.