Demosophia

New CSIS Report on the Iraq War

Tony Cordesman, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has a new report on the Iraq War (h/t: Dan, at WoC). Some key excerpts:

The insurgency so far lacks any major foreign support other than limited amounts of money, weapons, and foreign supporters. It does not have the support of most Shi'ites and Kurds, who make up some 70-80% of the population. If Iraqi forces become effective in large numbers, if the Iraqi government demonstrates that its success means the phase out of Coalition forces, and if the Iraqi government remains inclusive in dealing with Sunnis willing to come over to its side, the insurgency should be defeated over time -- although some cadres could then operate as diehards at the terrorist level for a decade or more.

Apparently he didn't get the memo about the conflict being unwinnable, but he does genuflect in that general direction:

To succeed, the US must plan for failure as well as success. It must see the development or escalation of insurgency as a serious risk in any contingency were (sic) it is possible, and take preventive and ongoing steps to prevent or limit it. This is an essential aspect of war planning and no Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, service chief, or unified and specified commander can be excused for failing to plan and act in this area. Responsibility begins directly at the top, and failures at any other level pale to insignificance by comparison.

Well I don't have the endowments of Cordesman, but let me offer a few observations. First, one must assume that he's not suggesting we "plan to fail," although some will probably accuse him of that. Rather, what he suggests is that our war planning is too infused with "happy talk," and is therefore not realistic about the capabilities of this enemy. Although I have a great deal of confidence in our military, it's possible that Cordesman is right and we aren't taking the threat of "failure" seriously enough. Which raises the next issue.

There's a lot of difference between "planning for failure" in the sense of having contingencies should Iraq, or the Ummah, descend into civil war, and addressing the specific set of conditions that could lead to civil war. Conflating the two is like saying that knowing what you intend to do after the divorce is the same as dealing with the marital difficulties that could lead to divorce. Cordesman seems to imply the second meaning, but the first is also important. After all, Victor Davis Hanson doesn't think a civil war in the Middle East necessarily the worst that could happen. And if Hanson is right then what we ought to consider is what role we might play in such a war, since the consequences are probably not something we could just afford to ignore. Whether or not we "fail" in that sense isn't entirely up to us. The onus rests partly on the Iraqis.

But finally, the phrase "planning for failure" just doesn't strike this reader as appropriate to war strategy or tactics. I'm fairly certain that Eisenhower considering Project Overlord, and Grant when he made the right turn to steal a march on Lee, were both fully cognizant of the risks and contingencies involved. But I'm also pretty sure they never used the phrase "planning for failure" to describe how they dealt with those contingencies. The words don't seem to emerge from the lexicon of military planning, but from the world of diplomacy. And if we're in a war then diplomacy has already failed in the first instance. So what we're really talking about is not "failure" but cascading failures, and whether the cascade can ultimately be halted before reaching the third conjecture.

And that's the whole point behind going into Iraq in the first place. The next plateau in the cascade would be a civil war, but even that's not as bad as it gets.

[Update: The link to Three Conjectures has been corrected. Apparently the old links I had to that series have been degraded as a result of some sort of Blogger glitch.]

Posted by Demosophist at December 19, 2005 12:32 PM | TrackBack