March 26, 2021
The War in Iraq Exposed Huge Flaws in American Strategic Thinking
The leaders who took America to war ignored history and also assumed that hostile regional powers would not push back and aid local resistance.
by John Mueller
As seen recently, intermittent altercations persist in Iraq and Syria between American forces and various Iran-backed militias. These, however, stem from, and are a continuation of, a fundamental error in the design of the war. This should have been apparent to its instigators even before the war was launched in 2003, and it is almost breath-taking in its naiveté.
An extensive U.S. Army study of the war contends that “the overwhelming majority of decisions in the Iraq War were made by highly intelligent, highly experienced, leaders.†However, it concludes that the “failure to achieve our strategic objectives†derived from reasoning that contained “systemic failures,†and high among these was that “U.S. leaders seemed to believe that other regional nations would not react.â€
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/war-iraq-exposed-huge-flaws-american-strategic-thinking-181188
