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CIAO DATE: 09/03
Foreign Policy
From Victory to Success: An FP-Carnegie Special Report
Now for the Hard Part
Jessica Tuchman Mathews*
After months of Iraq dominating the news, why should you care about the war’s aftermath, now that the drama of armed conflict has ended? Because, without diminishing the brilliance of the military campaign, the easier phase is over. The part that the United States is less good at, less practiced in, and less politically ready for is still to come. This more difficult phase will determine whether Americans, and the world, will look back on the Iraq war as not just a victory but a success.
Iraq clearly proves again, hard on the heels of Afghanistan, that the United States chronically underestimates the difficulties of nonmilitary aspects of foreign interventions and wildly inflates nonmilitary goals without committing the resources required to achieve them. Military planning for the Iraq war took more than a year and reached a level of detail down to the location of windows on targeted buildings. The postwar plan was altogether different. It largely ignored not just details but major aspects of Iraq’s political landscape and well-established lessons of prior foreign interventions, like the overriding need to quickly establish an effective policing force. The U.S. plan assumed that Iraq’s government could be removed with minimal disruption to the country’s ability to function and that the United States would be welcomed with open arms. Best-case planning is bad enough; this plan was heavily weighted with wishful thinking.
The difference in how seriously the United States addressed the war and the postwar can be found in the priority assigned to the exercise of force versus that given to other instruments of power and influence, from intelligence to diplomacy to patient economic assistance. It is to be found in the 16 to 1 difference between the peacetime budgets for the Pentagon and for all of foreign operations. Only on the nonmilitary side does the United States indulge in goals, means, and public commitment that bear no relation to one another.
This gap has widened during the last quarter century, under both political parties, to a point where it severely strains U.S. capabilities. The afterwar in Iraq will be a decisive test of whether this trend will be reversed, or whether, like Afghanistan in the 1980s, the intervention in Iraq will be a military victory followed by a costly political defeat.
The stakes are particularly high in Iraq because, if history is any guide, occupation and reconstruction will shape U.S. relations with the Arab world—and perhaps the whole Muslim world—for decades, just as prior military occupations profoundly altered relations with Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq may be a historical first for the region, but the United States is not writing history on a blank slate. Each side is ignorant of the other, and there is deep mutual suspicion, colored by the region’s bitter, recent experience of colonial rule and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Achieving a positive outcome requires every ounce of wisdom, patience, and realism the United States can bring to bear.
Following the progress of the war was easy: Troops advanced, targets were destroyed, and cities were taken. But keeping track of the aftermath—phase two of the war—is harder and, over the long term, more important. This special report, produced jointly by FOREIGN POLICY and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is an expert guide to these crucial issues that will be illuminating reading now and a valuable reference for months to come.
Notes
Note *: Jessica Tuchman Mathews is president of the Carnegie Endowment. Back