Sign Up for ASP Alerts This essay is part of the ongoing American Security Project series, Iraq: Lessons Learned. Read more essays in this series here.
By Robert Gallucci
November 14, 2007
The United States launched a military operation against Iraq without a compelling reason for doing so. We may have learned a lot from our many mistakes after the end of large unit military operations and the fall of Baghdad, but a larger lesson should be drawn from the decision to invade Iraq in the first place. This was not a good idea badly executed; it was a very bad idea from the start.
Much has been made of the failure of the intelligence community to correctly characterize Iraq’s capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological and nuclear. And, in fact, the intelligence assessment did mistakenly have Iraq in possession of chemical and biological weapons. But it did not assert that Iraq had nuclear weapons, only that it could build such weapons more quickly than other countries – if it were to acquire the necessary fissile material – because it had done essential research and development before the first Gulf War.
This is not a fine point; it is a fundamental one. The Administration never
explained how it presumed biological and chemical weapons threatened the United States or its allies, where Iraq would acquire sufficient fissile material to build a militarily significant nuclear capability, or why the United States’ overwhelming conventional and nuclear forces could not deter Iraq from acting against American interests and its friends in the Middle East.
There were, to be sure, suggestions from the policy community that Iraq was connected with terrorists and even to those responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001. But the intelligence community did not support those claims.
Iraq did not attack anyone in 2003, nor was it about to attack anyone. At best, the United States launched a preventive war without sufficient evidence that America’s vital interests would ever be put at risk by Iraq. At best, we were responding to Iraq’s flagrant violation of numerous United Nations Security Council Resolutions, without the support of the international community. At best, we miscalculated and over-reached.
At worst, we went to war, invaded a country, and over-threw a government in order to shape the political landscape of a region more to our liking, not to stop aggression or to defend vital interests. Nor was this an intervention launched for humanitarian reasons, to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s oppression. This was not an essential part of the argument – at least not before the invasion.
The lesson, then, from our experience in Iraq is that the United States should go to war only when there are compelling reasons to do so, reasons that can be articulated by the government and stand up to the scrutiny of the Congress and the people.
Robert Gallucci is the Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is a leading expert in U.S. foreign policy and international efforts to stop weapons of mass destruction programs. His career with the U.S. State Department included service on the first post-Gulf War arms inspection effort known as the UN Special Commission on Iraq and as the lead Ambassador responsible for the negotiation of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which significantly impacted North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
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