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The American Security Project asked some of the nation's best minds to ponder this question: "What lessons should America draw from its experience in Iraq?" The essays featured in this series seek to answer this question and provide insight from which we can all benefit. Learn more about Iraq: Lessons Learned.
>> FEATURED ESSAY
April 2, 2008
Debunking the Conventional Wisdom on Iraq
By Benjamin H. Friedman and Christopher Preble
Conventional wisdom inside the Beltway holds that success could have been achieved in Iraq at a reasonable cost with more troops, better planning, and more cooperation among U.S. government agencies. The policy recommendations that flow from these lessons aim to reform the national security bureaucracy so that we will get it right the next time. But this view is wrong and dangerous. The Iraq debacle shows that we need a different national security strategy, not merely better tactics and tools to serve the current one.
By insisting that there was a right way to remake Iraq, we ignore the limits on our power that the enterprise has exposed and risk repeating our mistake. Deposing Saddam Hussein was relatively simple, but creating a new state to rule Iraq was beyond our grasp. Maybe the United States can improve its ability to manage occupations, but the principal lesson Iraq teaches is to avoid them.
Conventional wisdom now says that the failures and errors in judgment can be 
attributed to poor planning. Better plans would have meant a larger invasion force, which would have prevented central authority in Iraq from unraveling. If it had been operating from better plans, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) would not have pursued de-Baathification so aggressively, and it would not have let the Iraqi Army collapse.
The planning for the occupation failed, the story goes, because government was uncoordinated and individual agencies were unprepared for unconventional war. Hence, various Washington think tanks have proposed to reform the national security bureaucracy. These proposals rely, not only on faulty premises about Iraq, but also on undue faith in what the U.S. government can achieve through planning and coordination.
The fact is, planning for the war was both plentiful and reasonably prescient. The problem was the Bush administration’s unwillingness to use the plans. Accurate information about the likely postwar situation was available—it was either discarded or ignored. Ideology, combined with a healthy dose of wishful thinking and analytical bias, trumped expertise. No amount of bureaucratic re-jiggering can make the president listen to the right people. The lesson here is not that the United States national security establishment needs better planning, but that it needs better leaders. That problem is solved by elections, not bureaucratic tinkering.
The more important problem with the idea that planning could have saved Iraq is that it implies that proper organizational charts and meetings can stabilize broken countries and make order where there is none. This confuses a process with a policy, a bureaucratic mechanism with the power to establish a new political order. The trick is not having the right plans; it is having the power to implement them. Americans never had that in Iraq; the power to conquer foreign countries is not the power to run them. There was not then and is not now an American plan sufficient to solve Iraq’s fundamental problem—the lack of popular support within Iraqi society for an equitable division of power.
Another reason Americans have struggled in Iraq is that nation-building is at odds with our national character. Whatever else changed after September 11, America remains unprepared for long-term military occupations. Neither the State Department nor the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—technically part of State—is built to administer an empire. The department’s budget is tiny because its aim is to relate to foreign nations, not to run them. When it comes to nation-building, brokering civil and ethnic conflict, and waging counterinsurgency, we are our own worst enemy, and that is a sign of our lingering common sense.
The lessons drawn from the war in Iraq should include caution about the limits of our power. The fetish for planning and reordering the national security establishment might produce some worthwhile changes, but if it makes it easier to wage wars to remake foreign societies, we will have learned nothing at all.
This article is adapted from the Cato Policy Analysis, “Learning the Right Lessons from Iraq.”
Benjamin H. Friedman is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and a Ph.D. candidate in the Security Studies Program at MIT.
Christopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.
>> PREVIOUS ESSAYS
The Undisciplined Pentagon Budget
By Gordon Adams
February 20, 2008
Iraq War Planners Ignored Powerful Historic Lessons
By Robert D. Hormats
February 13, 2008
Welcoming Our Warriors
By Paul Rieckhoff
February 6, 2008
The Business of Defense Does Matter
By Admiral Bill Owens, USN (Ret.)
January 30, 2008
Rebalancing Our National Power
By Joseph J. Collins
January 23, 2008
What it Really Means to Support Our Troops
By Bobby Muller
January 16, 2008
The New Face of War
By Arthur S. Obermayer
January 9, 2008
America Needs a New Agency to Help Failed States
By Morton H. Halperin
December 20, 2007
It Takes a Country to Fight a War
By Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney, USMC (Ret.)
December 12, 2007
No More Iraqs
By James N. Miller, Jr.
December 5, 2007
How We Leave Matters
By Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, USN (Ret.)
November 28, 2007
A Very Bad Idea from the Start
By Robert Gallucci
November 14, 2007
Broken Contract: The Limits of the All-Volunteer Army
By Lawrence J. Korb
November 7, 2007
One Team, One Fight
By Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy, USA (Ret.)
October 31, 2007
And to the Republic for Which it Stands
By The Honorable Gary Hart
October 24, 2007
Too Little, Too Late:
Societal Transformation on a Shoestring is No Strategy
By Lieutenant General Daniel Christman
October 17, 2007
Informed Decisions: Process Before Policy
By Paul R. Pillar
October 10, 2007