"War on Terror," my @ss.
As far as Iraq goes, a profound lesson for future reference was that when we cleaned up the mess, our worst mistakes were philosophical ones, made with good intentions. These contrasted with what worked, which is how we should do things in the future.
1) Iraq’s institutions were rotten to the core. On one hand, when we recognized this, and replaced an institution with a western style one, it worked like a charm. On the other hand, when we tried to preserve and rebuild an existing institution, it was a recipe for abject failure, that wasted time and resources, and never did work.
J. Paul Bremer and his young and enthusiastic subordinates actually deserve much credit for what should be a prosperous Iraq in the future, unless the Iraqis bungle things up. He created a world class financial system model based on what had proven to work best in a dozen other countries—without the baggage they developed bringing those systems about.
So in this case, the lesson that should be learned is that respecting the existing culture’s way of doing business is wrong, when there are better ways of doing things. The Iraq occupation will hopefully, in the future, be compared with the MacArthur occupation of Japan, and found wanting because of our desire to be respectful instead of efficient.
And the nightmare version of what we did in Afghanistan is, and will remain a disaster, for just this reason. There, we should have begun with a blank slate, keeping none of their worthless, corrupt, and stupid systems at all. Had we done so at the very start, they would be doing a lot better than they are.
2) Another grave error was America’s ceaseless effort to be “internationalist” with our endeavors. Iraq’s legal system was based on the French Code Civil, which is in turn based on Napoleonic Law that itself is based on Roman Law. In past, we foolishly allowed this to become the dominant international legal system, though our own, and Britain’s legal system, based on Common Law, is far superior to it in every way.
Preserving this system as the Iraqi legal system did them no favors, as a Code Civil legal system stifles entrepreneurship, creativity, and business success, in favor of elitist micromanagement.
Efforts to be internationalist also meant that we encouraged other countries, with no such scruples, to outbid America for Iraqi oil, and other lucrative deals.
So the lesson learned should be that internationalism sucks, and is for suckers.
3) Americans loathe big brother government, which ironically increases in America every day. However, we refrained from using these techniques in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they might have been profoundly good in stabilizing those nations.
The US Army should have had dozens of squad sized units whose function would be to record the identities of every Iraqi we met. This means the whole gambit. Photographs, fingerprints, voice prints, DNA sample, laser height and weight. Then each and every one would be issued an ID card, with just their picture on the front, and encrypted dot matrix 2D bar code on the back.
And that ID card would be their voting card, ration card, government anything card, military and police ID, driver’s license, internal passport, everything.
After that, every time anybody talked to an Iraqi, their card would be scanned, so our personnel would immediately know if they were up to hanky panky. If their card was lost or destroyed, they would be detained until their identity was verified and they were issued a new card. If their card was a fake, they would be detained. It would be extremely hard to be a terrorist. And any al-Qaeda foreigner would be an easy mark.
For us, 1984 is horrific oppression. For them, peace and stability.
4) American foreign policy is about democracy when we want it to be about democracy. And while this is not all the time, it is a far sight more than anyone else.