The Lost War
The Lost War
The United States doesn’t know how to lose a war. West Point’s
Curriculum doesn’t include a course that teaches our generals or presidents how to say we failed in our mission. Even if there were a protocol for handing our saber to the enemy in a big ceremony it wouldn’t work in the situation we have in Iraq for there is no person in authority to accept our admission of failure. Perhaps we could establish a new protocol similar to one I remember from an old western movie in which the two sides fought a particularly fierce battle until sundown when both withdrew for a night’s rest. When they went back to the battlefield the next morning they noticed that the enemy had just folded their tents and departed.
However it may be staged, the American people need, and are entitled to, a proper closure to this war. We need to hear someone state clearly that we were led into the invasion of Iraq because someone misinterpreted the intelligence reports, failed to question the accuracy of evidence and let personal feelings over-rule reason and sound judgment. Over and over our leaders have told us the invasion was justified, yet is seems clear that they failed to design the strategies needed to follow-up the military victory with arrangements for establishing a peaceful civil regime that would provide police, and public utility services. Finally, they failed to provide safe workplaces and suitable incentives to lead the people into significant employment.
Our history includes a great variety of wars in which our people devised techniques to fit the situations they faced whether the battlefield was on the water, in the forest or in cornfields; whether the battles involved individuals or organized groups. Also, we learned a lot from the battles in the jungles of Korea and Viet Nam. But all of these experiences failed to adequately prepare us for Iraq. The enemy there doesn’t appear to be organized, wears no uniform and follows no regular system of attack.
It appears that in Iraq we have let a bunch of unorganized clever, inspired, nationalistically dedicated civilians outmaneuver us in a style of warfare that we simply can’t understand. Our service personnel are doing their job well insofar as they are able to understand what their job is. The frontline leaders don’t seem to know how to defeat these people. They can’t tell the men to go out and kill every person they see. It would be stupid to tell them to kill every man with a beard or that looks like Hussein. Yet the men can’t simply wait to act until some fellow sets off the package of dynamite he is hiding under his jacket or drives his bomb laden car into the traffic gate barrier.
We civilians at home are also unable to find a solution. We hear the reports of kidnapping, suicide bombing, and beheading of captives and are shocked. We grieve with the relatives and friends of the victims and are angry and disturbed that our leaders don’t seem to be as concerned about it as we are. They give us assurances that our programs are working and progress is being made, acting as if they don’t read the papers or watch the television news reports.
Being so deeply concerned about the daily news helps push us in our search for a plausible reason for being unable to end the war and bring our troops home like we have done in past wars. Thinking about the horrors of it keeps us from accepting it as routine like the weather reports or the Saturday football games results. It is important that we refuse to let ourselves become callous about this war that is killing and disabling so many of our young people and consuming so much of our precious resources.
The great volume of the news and the horrible nature of it tend to occupy so much of our thought so that we get wrapped up in the NOW of the news. We see so much news about the current activities that we have come to believe that we are losing the war because of something that is happening now, in the present. This concentration on the NOW is blinding us to the important happenings of the past.
If we shift our thoughts to the questions of the who and the what of the PAST we may be able to learn what got this horrible war started and for what reason. Somewhere along the line something must have gone wrong. A nation doesn’t wake up one morning to find itself in a war, certainly not one it is losing, in a small country on the other side of the world. Understanding the causes and events leading up to the war may not tell us how to stop it but it certainly should help us understand it better than we do now.
The terrorist attack of 9/11/01 is a logical starting point. This event enraged the president as well as the general population of the country. It was planned and staged by Osma ben Laden in association with el-Qaeda. Immediately the president vowed to hunt them down and bring them to justice for which vow he received praise from the entire world. The search for the terrorist leaders began in Afghanistan but failed to catch them.
For reasons not know to us the President seemed to suspect Saddam Hussein of Iraq of being involved in the 9/11 attack and instructed his intelligence people to search for evidence of his involvement with el-Qaeda. Soon the campaign in Afghanistan shifted to Iraq with emphasis on the search for evidence of collaboration between Hussein and the terrorist organizations. President Bush appeared to have a strong dislike for Mr. Hussein as well as a desire to have him deposed from his leadership role in Iraq.
The president was certain that Hussein had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and was actively engaged in a program to produce Nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush felt the U.N. inspectors were not diligent enough in their search for these weapons and worked to have their work stopped and replaced by U. S. inspectors. He was confident they would find the evidence needed to substantiate Iraq’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
As the search for weapons continued the president and his staff began formulating plans for invading Iraq to overthrow Dictator Saddam Hussein before he could launch an attack against us. We would depose him and free the Iraqi people from his repressive, cruel regime. The president was confident the victory would be swift and the citizens would happily welcome us and embrace our plans to help them establish a free, democratic society.
Many citizens questioned the wisdom of making war on another nation which had not attacked us. This seemed contrary to our long custom of not playing the role of aggressor. The president explained that Hussein had on hand a supply of weapons of mass destructions and was in the process of obtaining equipment and materials to build nuclear weapons and that we simply could not wait to see a mushroom cloud before taking action to defend our country. Mr. Bush explained that in addition to eliminating the threat to our country our attack would help spread liberty to other people of the world which he felt the United States was called to do.
Efforts to enlist support among our friends were rebuffed, with leaders in France and Germany being critical of the idea. State Secretary Powell presented our case to the United Nations, but failed to get an endorsement of support. President Bush was disappointed and was highly critical of those refusing help and vowed to go it alone if necessary. He did not feel it would be proper to be in a position of asking any nation, or the U. N. for permission to defend the United States and its citizens.
As the constitutional authority to declare war is vested in the congress, the president requested Congress to grant him authority to use the power necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Congress has its own rules of parliamentary procedure but they are very similar to those in the traditional Roberts Rules of Order. Ordinarily an issue important enough to involve the nation in war would be referred to committees for study and investigation of the information and verification of the facts cited to support the request.
Members of congress had heard the president personally state that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and that he was seeking to buy material to produce nuclear bombs. They heard him say that we were in imminent danger of being attacked and that we could not afford to delay the removal of this evil man from power. Accepting his words as truth would demand that we consider the Mr. Hussein as a threat carrying consequences greater than those of the 9/11 attacks. Clearly it was a matter that could not be delayed, and Congress promptly gave Mr. Bush the authority he sought.
Congress incurred a goodly share of the blame for the resulting war by its failure to investigate the facts and verify the intelligence before voting to give the president the authority he requested.
The leaders in the Pentagon were closely allied with the president and stood ready to cooperate fully with the president. Any who expressed disagreement were aware of the threat to their career and most fulfilled their duty as good soldiers.
Finally, the president, the top link in the chain of command, failed. He was inexperienced in war making. Yet the overwhelming support he received for his firm and resolute in response to the 9/11 attacks could not help impressing him and confirming in his mind the importance of prompt, firm action in times of emergency. In speeches and later actions Mr. Bush has clearly affirmed his conviction that the most important characteristic of a war leader is the appearance of being tough and unbending. It appears that this conviction was the major influence that spurred him to proceed with his war plans without bothering to question the reliability of the intelligence that had been furnished to him.
The Armed Forces did their job well; the war was won in record time with surprisingly few casualties. Then news came that plans for the transformation had not been drawn up. It appeared to be a ’plan as you go’ program. We suffered the blunders that a high school pupil could have predicted. The leaders we chose were incompetent or crooked, or both, and the local population was divided and unhappy. Instead of choosing local contractors and workmen to rebuild and restore the economy, we awarded contracts, without bids, to American firms. These contractors were free enterprise entrepreneurs interested in making profits for their stockholders and could not be expected to have an interest in establishing a democratic society in Iraq.
It took very little agitation to stir up the unemployed, the Saddam loyalists and the Infidel hating religious radicals. Within a short while there were individuals and groups searching for ways and means of making life miserable for the American Infidel invaders. Terrorist groups found sources of bomb making materials and hosts of individuals who were willing to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombs in the process of killing foreign soldiers, workers and natives employed by the foreigners. Almost immediately the attacks were extended to contractors working for the Americans. The types of weapons were expanded to include any device they could use to kill persons or to demolish property. As word got out to surrounding countries there was a huge influx of all manner of individuals anxious to help their friends drive out the infidel invaders, making a small fortune in the process.
Assuming that things would improve if we moved to let them run their own affairs, we announced that on 30 June 2004 we would turn the sovereignty of the country over to the local population. This was a welcome move which should go far toward development of support from all segments of the Iraqi society. However, the “turnover” contract had a long list of conditions and agreements that revealed that it was not a turnover of sovereignty at all. We were getting rid of the messy details of administration and keeping the big paying contracts and oil operations for ourselves or our political friends.
The future is not bright. An election scheduled for January 2005 will elect a permanent government. However, the insurgents claim it won’t happen. Even if the election is held and a new government takes over the operation of the country they will still be bound by the trick clauses of the June 30 sovereignty transfer. The Halliburton and affiliate and other contracts will still be in force as well as the agreement that U S troops will remain in Iraq as long as they are needed to maintain public safety.
President Bush has assured the world that the January elections will be held in spite of the insurgent’s efforts to prevent them.
In November 2004 we will have an election of our own. The new president will be inaugurated into a government still facing the unsettled situation in Iraq. The president will need a true miracle if he is to redeem the many misjudgments and errors that have hung like a dark cloud over this war from its inception. For the sake of everyone involved we pray that he will be able to remove the “lost” label from it with honor and goodwill.
Jerry Clements 10/3/04
The United States doesn’t know how to lose a war. West Point’s
Curriculum doesn’t include a course that teaches our generals or presidents how to say we failed in our mission. Even if there were a protocol for handing our saber to the enemy in a big ceremony it wouldn’t work in the situation we have in Iraq for there is no person in authority to accept our admission of failure. Perhaps we could establish a new protocol similar to one I remember from an old western movie in which the two sides fought a particularly fierce battle until sundown when both withdrew for a night’s rest. When they went back to the battlefield the next morning they noticed that the enemy had just folded their tents and departed.
However it may be staged, the American people need, and are entitled to, a proper closure to this war. We need to hear someone state clearly that we were led into the invasion of Iraq because someone misinterpreted the intelligence reports, failed to question the accuracy of evidence and let personal feelings over-rule reason and sound judgment. Over and over our leaders have told us the invasion was justified, yet is seems clear that they failed to design the strategies needed to follow-up the military victory with arrangements for establishing a peaceful civil regime that would provide police, and public utility services. Finally, they failed to provide safe workplaces and suitable incentives to lead the people into significant employment.
Our history includes a great variety of wars in which our people devised techniques to fit the situations they faced whether the battlefield was on the water, in the forest or in cornfields; whether the battles involved individuals or organized groups. Also, we learned a lot from the battles in the jungles of Korea and Viet Nam. But all of these experiences failed to adequately prepare us for Iraq. The enemy there doesn’t appear to be organized, wears no uniform and follows no regular system of attack.
It appears that in Iraq we have let a bunch of unorganized clever, inspired, nationalistically dedicated civilians outmaneuver us in a style of warfare that we simply can’t understand. Our service personnel are doing their job well insofar as they are able to understand what their job is. The frontline leaders don’t seem to know how to defeat these people. They can’t tell the men to go out and kill every person they see. It would be stupid to tell them to kill every man with a beard or that looks like Hussein. Yet the men can’t simply wait to act until some fellow sets off the package of dynamite he is hiding under his jacket or drives his bomb laden car into the traffic gate barrier.
We civilians at home are also unable to find a solution. We hear the reports of kidnapping, suicide bombing, and beheading of captives and are shocked. We grieve with the relatives and friends of the victims and are angry and disturbed that our leaders don’t seem to be as concerned about it as we are. They give us assurances that our programs are working and progress is being made, acting as if they don’t read the papers or watch the television news reports.
Being so deeply concerned about the daily news helps push us in our search for a plausible reason for being unable to end the war and bring our troops home like we have done in past wars. Thinking about the horrors of it keeps us from accepting it as routine like the weather reports or the Saturday football games results. It is important that we refuse to let ourselves become callous about this war that is killing and disabling so many of our young people and consuming so much of our precious resources.
The great volume of the news and the horrible nature of it tend to occupy so much of our thought so that we get wrapped up in the NOW of the news. We see so much news about the current activities that we have come to believe that we are losing the war because of something that is happening now, in the present. This concentration on the NOW is blinding us to the important happenings of the past.
If we shift our thoughts to the questions of the who and the what of the PAST we may be able to learn what got this horrible war started and for what reason. Somewhere along the line something must have gone wrong. A nation doesn’t wake up one morning to find itself in a war, certainly not one it is losing, in a small country on the other side of the world. Understanding the causes and events leading up to the war may not tell us how to stop it but it certainly should help us understand it better than we do now.
The terrorist attack of 9/11/01 is a logical starting point. This event enraged the president as well as the general population of the country. It was planned and staged by Osma ben Laden in association with el-Qaeda. Immediately the president vowed to hunt them down and bring them to justice for which vow he received praise from the entire world. The search for the terrorist leaders began in Afghanistan but failed to catch them.
For reasons not know to us the President seemed to suspect Saddam Hussein of Iraq of being involved in the 9/11 attack and instructed his intelligence people to search for evidence of his involvement with el-Qaeda. Soon the campaign in Afghanistan shifted to Iraq with emphasis on the search for evidence of collaboration between Hussein and the terrorist organizations. President Bush appeared to have a strong dislike for Mr. Hussein as well as a desire to have him deposed from his leadership role in Iraq.
The president was certain that Hussein had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and was actively engaged in a program to produce Nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush felt the U.N. inspectors were not diligent enough in their search for these weapons and worked to have their work stopped and replaced by U. S. inspectors. He was confident they would find the evidence needed to substantiate Iraq’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
As the search for weapons continued the president and his staff began formulating plans for invading Iraq to overthrow Dictator Saddam Hussein before he could launch an attack against us. We would depose him and free the Iraqi people from his repressive, cruel regime. The president was confident the victory would be swift and the citizens would happily welcome us and embrace our plans to help them establish a free, democratic society.
Many citizens questioned the wisdom of making war on another nation which had not attacked us. This seemed contrary to our long custom of not playing the role of aggressor. The president explained that Hussein had on hand a supply of weapons of mass destructions and was in the process of obtaining equipment and materials to build nuclear weapons and that we simply could not wait to see a mushroom cloud before taking action to defend our country. Mr. Bush explained that in addition to eliminating the threat to our country our attack would help spread liberty to other people of the world which he felt the United States was called to do.
Efforts to enlist support among our friends were rebuffed, with leaders in France and Germany being critical of the idea. State Secretary Powell presented our case to the United Nations, but failed to get an endorsement of support. President Bush was disappointed and was highly critical of those refusing help and vowed to go it alone if necessary. He did not feel it would be proper to be in a position of asking any nation, or the U. N. for permission to defend the United States and its citizens.
As the constitutional authority to declare war is vested in the congress, the president requested Congress to grant him authority to use the power necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Congress has its own rules of parliamentary procedure but they are very similar to those in the traditional Roberts Rules of Order. Ordinarily an issue important enough to involve the nation in war would be referred to committees for study and investigation of the information and verification of the facts cited to support the request.
Members of congress had heard the president personally state that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and that he was seeking to buy material to produce nuclear bombs. They heard him say that we were in imminent danger of being attacked and that we could not afford to delay the removal of this evil man from power. Accepting his words as truth would demand that we consider the Mr. Hussein as a threat carrying consequences greater than those of the 9/11 attacks. Clearly it was a matter that could not be delayed, and Congress promptly gave Mr. Bush the authority he sought.
Congress incurred a goodly share of the blame for the resulting war by its failure to investigate the facts and verify the intelligence before voting to give the president the authority he requested.
The leaders in the Pentagon were closely allied with the president and stood ready to cooperate fully with the president. Any who expressed disagreement were aware of the threat to their career and most fulfilled their duty as good soldiers.
Finally, the president, the top link in the chain of command, failed. He was inexperienced in war making. Yet the overwhelming support he received for his firm and resolute in response to the 9/11 attacks could not help impressing him and confirming in his mind the importance of prompt, firm action in times of emergency. In speeches and later actions Mr. Bush has clearly affirmed his conviction that the most important characteristic of a war leader is the appearance of being tough and unbending. It appears that this conviction was the major influence that spurred him to proceed with his war plans without bothering to question the reliability of the intelligence that had been furnished to him.
The Armed Forces did their job well; the war was won in record time with surprisingly few casualties. Then news came that plans for the transformation had not been drawn up. It appeared to be a ’plan as you go’ program. We suffered the blunders that a high school pupil could have predicted. The leaders we chose were incompetent or crooked, or both, and the local population was divided and unhappy. Instead of choosing local contractors and workmen to rebuild and restore the economy, we awarded contracts, without bids, to American firms. These contractors were free enterprise entrepreneurs interested in making profits for their stockholders and could not be expected to have an interest in establishing a democratic society in Iraq.
It took very little agitation to stir up the unemployed, the Saddam loyalists and the Infidel hating religious radicals. Within a short while there were individuals and groups searching for ways and means of making life miserable for the American Infidel invaders. Terrorist groups found sources of bomb making materials and hosts of individuals who were willing to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombs in the process of killing foreign soldiers, workers and natives employed by the foreigners. Almost immediately the attacks were extended to contractors working for the Americans. The types of weapons were expanded to include any device they could use to kill persons or to demolish property. As word got out to surrounding countries there was a huge influx of all manner of individuals anxious to help their friends drive out the infidel invaders, making a small fortune in the process.
Assuming that things would improve if we moved to let them run their own affairs, we announced that on 30 June 2004 we would turn the sovereignty of the country over to the local population. This was a welcome move which should go far toward development of support from all segments of the Iraqi society. However, the “turnover” contract had a long list of conditions and agreements that revealed that it was not a turnover of sovereignty at all. We were getting rid of the messy details of administration and keeping the big paying contracts and oil operations for ourselves or our political friends.
The future is not bright. An election scheduled for January 2005 will elect a permanent government. However, the insurgents claim it won’t happen. Even if the election is held and a new government takes over the operation of the country they will still be bound by the trick clauses of the June 30 sovereignty transfer. The Halliburton and affiliate and other contracts will still be in force as well as the agreement that U S troops will remain in Iraq as long as they are needed to maintain public safety.
President Bush has assured the world that the January elections will be held in spite of the insurgent’s efforts to prevent them.
In November 2004 we will have an election of our own. The new president will be inaugurated into a government still facing the unsettled situation in Iraq. The president will need a true miracle if he is to redeem the many misjudgments and errors that have hung like a dark cloud over this war from its inception. For the sake of everyone involved we pray that he will be able to remove the “lost” label from it with honor and goodwill.
Jerry Clements 10/3/04
posted by Jeremiah | 1:59 PM
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