Lessons from Iraq

President-elect Barack Obama said throughout his campaign that he plans to withdraw our troops from Iraq and re-deploy some of them to the failing state of Afghanistan. Iraq will be left to handle itself.

Although the Iraqis have everything needed to prosper in a modern world – a commodity to sell in a modern economy, public schools, electricity, roads, etc. – their future is being left up to speculation. Hopefully, their government is strong enough to maintain stability after the glue that’s been holding it together picks up and moves out.

Coming from this conflict, besides the thousands of lives lost and the billions of dollars spent, are new lessons for the United States. New manuals are coming out on conducting modern warfare and stabilization after invasion.

Unfortunately, many of the manuals’ lessons are things we should have already known. After Vietnam, we discarded operations manuals on countering guerillas, saying that “we’d never fight that war again.”

In Iraq and Afghanistan, 30 years later, when we needed to recall that information, it wasn’t able to be found. Undoubtedly, we recreated the same mistakes to learn lessons that could have been taught the easy way. If we could compare the manuals coming out today with the manuals from Vietnam, no doubt there would be overlaps. Only now are these lessons being taught to our soldiers.

However, many within the armed forces are reluctant to maintain these teachings. West Point is divided right now over whether it should change its curriculum to permanently incorporate counter-insurgency tactics or whether it should go back to “traditional” military teachings. Warfare changes, and arguably this new trend of fighting insurgents might become traditional in modern warfare.

As one “traditional” warfare strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in 1873, you need to make sure that the war you are fighting and the war you think you are fighting are the same. The recent trend of U.S. war in the past half century has involved combating insurgents. Therefore, we need to mandate training for our soldiers, or at least officers, in this regard.

This also means we need to constantly reassess the situation to make sure our strategies are right for the war we’re in. This goes beyond the military. To a large extent the insurgents were the result of our terrible execution in the aftermath of the invasion.

It’s become cliche now to say that the Bush administration has refused to hear dissident voices, people who point out discrepancies between what we perceive is going on and what’s really happening. In November 2005, Donald Rumsfeld suggested we shouldn’t call the forces we are fighting in Iraq “insurgents.”

We’re about to shift troops to Afghanistan, a place that’s even less hopeful than Iraq (if that’s possible). Let’s hope we take some of the lessons learned with us, and let’s institute those lessons in the training of our future soldiers, so that they don’t have to spend five years learning them the hard way as well.