Replies

Although successful our mission in Iraq was not perfectly executed, and Perle says there are important lessons to be learned from whatever mistakes we made there.

The fifth lesson is to ignore those who now recant and try to get right. Seems like Perle has just about done a 180 or maybe it was just a head fake.

This brings me to my second lesson: In aligning our political and military strategy, we should make sure we have the support of a significant segment of the local population.

How ya gonna do that if a brutal dictator like Saddam has killed all his opposition? There simply wasn't any opposition in the local population.

Good post, and actually this was some good concise testimony. Taking the 4 lessons in turn,

First, it is essential that we are clear about, and carefully align, our political and military objectives.

This one is rather mysterious to me. What is Perle saying? In what sense were our military objectives in Iraq not aligned with our political objectives? (Not rhetorical question -- I am honestly wondering what Perle has in mind here.)

This brings me to my second lesson: In aligning our political and military strategy, we should make sure we have the support of a significant segment of the local population.

Makes sense to me.

The third lesson is, by now, generally accepted: our intelligence is sometimes, dangerously inadequate.

Obviously. Incidentally, this was news to me: "There is reason to believe that we were sucked into an ill conceived initial attack aimed at Saddam himself by double agents planted by the regime."

What I worry about is that the "intelligence was wrong" meme often gets interpreted in a simplistic one-sided way, as if the main task is to always reduce our estimates of what materials are possessed by foreign regimes, always lower our estimates of foreign threats. That would be a grave mistake.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, a fourth lesson: we must do everything possible to avoid becoming an occupying power. ... The image on Iraqi television of an American pro consul informing the Iraqi people of the rules we made for them and the arrangement of their lives for which we assumed responsibility, contributed significantly to the difficulties we have had in Iraq.

I can't argue w/this. I wish I understood the reason for waiting so long to hold an election, myself.

We should have turned Iraq over to the Iraqis on the day Baghdad fell

We'll, I'm not as eminently qualified as these experts but even I know that is just plain stupid.

Hey dick . . here's a

call someone who cares.

It appears Pearle is no longer singing pearls of wisdom. Just his statement "This brings me to my second lesson: In aligning our political and military strategy, we should make sure we have the support of a significant segment of the local population.", makes me believe I no longer value his pearls of wisdom.
How the hell can one obtain a concensous to attack a country if you cannot even talk to the population beforehand. Is he indicating that we should somehow enter a country we plan to attacked, then set up polling places so that we can find if a majority of that nations population want us to come in and attacked them? Unless I do not understand what he said in #2, it appears he is simply flapping off. He like many others are now voicing opinions that seem to not dovetail with what they original urged the POTUS to do. Pearle had plenty of input to offer the administration prior to the invasion. Is he indicating that he was not amoung those that had their acts together?

This isn't a "lessons learned"... its a wish-list for a different reality than we faced.

Very concise indeed. As far as aligning one's military and political objectives, that is the single most difficult thing for a civilian executive branch to bring off. We have addressed it imperfectly at various stages - where a President outlines broad objectives that are congruent with his policies and allows the military to approach them creatively great success is often achieved - sometimes so swift and complete (Gulf War I, for example) that the executive is taken by surprise and forced to improvise. At times when this dictum is not followed disaster can ensue - one thinks of McNamara and Johnson identifying individual bombing mission targets during Vietnam. Here I think Bush pere was at a disadvantage and Bush fils did pretty well.

But that brings us to the second point, and it must be understood in the context of the results of Gulf War I and the unconscionable betrayal shortly thereafter of those elements of the domestic resistance that we had encouraged and then watched idly as they were systematically butchered. After this the well was poisoned - what indigenous resistance leader in his right mind would deal with the U.S. after that? It is that incident that I believe disallowed any effective buildup of a domestic arm to our intervention.

Intelligence was the third topic. Most of the controversy surrounds strategic intelligence, and the WMD's were only part of that. Others have mentioned this so I shall comment only briefly - there was a vogue in the intelligence community during the Clinton administration (and to be honest, before) to force a code of ethics onto the intelligence community that precluded our cultivation of such characters as drug smugglers, terrorists, and other known or suspected criminals. This had the effect of crippling the HUMINT portion of the equation; a simultaneous starry-eyed attraction to technology further gutted the HUMINT arm and by the time Gulf War I rolled around we were vastly overdependent on "national means" (i.e. satellites, SIGINT, overflights, etc.). In the field this meant that where there still were relationships with local power brokers (as in Afghanistan, those relationships having been developed through the Soviet occupation) we ended up meshing fairly quickly with an established resistance. That was not the case in Iraq; rather the opposite for the reasons I mentioned above. As the invasion became imminent tactical intelligence improved, and we have seen it improve greatly since the election to our great advantage and the disadvantage especially of foreign terrorists.

I cannot overemphasize the difficulty the refusal of the Turkish government to allow an incursion by the 4th ID from the north placed the overall grand tactics of the operation in. It was that more than anything else that allowed the resistance to fall back, regroup, and settle in for the long fight. I suspect that Perle was exaggerating a bit when he called for the turning over of the government to the Iraqis as soon as Baghdad fell; we hadn't, actually, secured the country yet for the simple reason that we were restricted to a south-to-north line of advance. But it may have been an option had the Turkish government decided otherwise.

Finally, occupation. Our role as an occupier was a necessary consequence of an early decision to disband the Iraqi army rather than risk incorporating suspect and unreliable elements of it into an overall security scheme. That decision has been greatly criticized since; I am still personally not certain that it was not the correct one. Certainly where the former government's intelligence organs were able to penetrate the newly-fledged security organization the results have been bloody. It may well be that keeping Saddam's army in place would have exacerbated that. Or perhaps not, I truly do not know.

We should address these areas whether Perle's analysis is correct or not. But we can be certain that if there is a "next time" it will not resemble the last, and we will find a new set of problems to address. He who falls into the trap of fighting the last was often loses the present one.