People who say there was a lack of planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq are right, but they miss a more important point: it was not merely the plan that was faulty, it was the perception. How much planning, after all, went into the war in Afghanistan? Within slightly over a month after 9/11 we were already dropping bombs and putting boots on the ground in Afghanistan, a fact that may have accurately reflected the prowess of our military. It said much less, however, about our ability to understand and solve the civil problems or deal with the insurgence that would arise in Iraq in the aftermath of an invasion. The Administration’s euphoria over the apparent Afghanistan success had two immediate negative effects: first, it blinded them to the vast differences between the societies and political situations in Afghanistan and Iraq; and, second, it encouraged a kind of seat-of-the-pants approach to an invasion of Iraq that was based more on arrogance and optimism than on the careful, worst-case-scenario planning that a successful military campaign would eventually demand. In this, if in nothing else, the Bush team was certainly fulfilling the “ad hoc” prescription of the Wolfowitz “Defense Planning Guidance”. And it fit in perfectly with the kind of free-wheeling military elan Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, favored for the New Model Army.
What it did not do is take into account the difficulties arising out of the differences between going into Afghanistan and going into Iraq. The war in Afghanistan had strong UN backing and broad multi-national support. The war in Iraq did not. The war in Afghanistan had the primary missions of removing the Taliban and destroying or at least disabling Al Qaeda. The war in Iraq had the avowed missions of removing Saddam Hussein and replacing his regime with a model Middle Eastern democracy. Afghanistan was a failed nation, decimated by a decade of warlordism and civil war. Iraq was one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East and quite stable. Afghanistan suffered from a decentralized near-anarchy, Iraq from a highly centralized totalitarian regime. Afghanistan was rural, Iraq urban. Military forces in Afghanistan had few modern weapons and were medieval in many of their techniques. The military in Iraq included highly trained modern forces with an effective command. In Afghanistan the US joined and utilized a highly successful and numerous opposition force. In Iraq there was no successful opposition, except for the Kurds, whom the US wanted for political reasons to keep isolated. Finally, in Afghanistan we had our influential, if somewhat designing, Pakistani allies to provide us with intelligence and act as go-betweens. In Iraq, alas, we have few Muslim friends who are not either tainted by ambition or disconnected by long exile from their country.
These are just some of the reasons why our experience in Afghanistan should scarcely have been taken as any kind of blueprint for the mission in Iraq, and why an American occupation of Iraq should have been recognized as the potential disaster it is increasingly becoming. But the Administration, during most of 2002, was busy selling the war, not planning the peace or critiquing its own assumptions about the consequences of an invasion. As a result, that much eulogized vision of a new Iraq, democratic, egalitarian, secular and prosperous, growing out of the ashes of the fall of Saddam according to a politically set timetable, is proving to have been based more on faith than reality. All this was foreseeable, and if the Administration did not see it, it is because it has always been in the nature of their leadership to justify what they already believe rather than seek to understand what is.
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