I’m still trying to figure out what point Peter Feaver, Christopher Gelpi, and Jason Reifler were making in their piece in Foreign Affairs, “The Strange Case of Iraq Syndrome”. They begin by contrasting the “Vietnam Syndrome” that afflicted U. S. policymakers following the conclusion of the Vietnam War:
After the Vietnam War, a generation of U.S. leaders developed what became known as “Vietnam syndromeâ€â€”a pathological belief that public support for the use of force was too fleeting, and the U.S. military’s power too uncertain, for foreign military operations to be advisable.
with something they’re terming “Iraq Syndrome”:
Iraq syndrome holds that Americans are casualty-phobic: they will support a military operation only if the cost in American lives is minimal. As a consequence, U.S. policymakers who wish to use force must fight as bloodlessly as possible and be quick to abandon their commitments if the adversary proves able to fight back and kill U.S. soldiers. The politically expedient position, in a world afflicted by Iraq syndrome, is a quasi-isolationist one, since the public is not willing to underwrite the costs of lasting international commitments.
“Quasi-isolationist” is a slander. There’s another term for it that’s already in the common parlance: noninterventionist. Are they embracing its opposite and encouraging Americans leaders to do so? There’s a term for that, too: imperialist.
I almost stopped reading when I encountered their definition of the goals of the U. S. invasion of Iraq:
Compared with the United States’ outright defeat in Afghanistan, the result of the U.S. campaign in Iraq looks like a modest success. It still might be possible to achieve some of the goals of the war—an Iraq that can govern and defend itself and that is an ally in the war against terrorists—albeit at a tragically high price.
a piece of historical revisionism if I’ve ever seen one. Here’s what President Bush said on March 19, 2003:
THE PRESIDENT: My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
So, did the United States achieve its objectives in Iraq or fail to do so? There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to speak of, the “grave danger” to which President Bush alluded. Under Saddam Hussein Iraq was not a liberal democracy. It remains not a liberal democracy. Iraq’s disarmament was fleeting and largely took the form of removing Sunni officers from the Iraqi military.
Is Iraq our “ally in the war against terrorists”? I would say that we have taken the side of Shi’ite terrorists against Sunni terrorists, embroiling ourselves in a sectarian conflict that’s been going on for more than a millennium. In 2002 Sunni terrorists may have been our greater concern. Now Shi’ite terrorists are an equal if not greater concern.
I was opposed to our invasion of Iraq for reasons that have actually come to fruition, one of the few to take that position publicly although there’s no lack of people claiming to have held that view all along. I would say, contra the authors that we lost the Iraq War, too.
This appears to be their thesis:
Iraq syndrome holds that Americans are casualty-phobic: they will support a military operation only if the cost in American lives is minimal. As a consequence, U.S. policymakers who wish to use force must fight as bloodlessly as possible and be quick to abandon their commitments if the adversary proves able to fight back and kill U.S. soldiers. The politically expedient position, in a world afflicted by Iraq syndrome, is a quasi-isolationist one, since the public is not willing to underwrite the costs of lasting international commitments.
But as prevalent as it is among politicians, Iraq syndrome does not appear to be as widespread among the broader public. American voters are not nearly as allergic to military force as their leaders think. In fact, the public will continue to adequately support a military mission even as its costs mount, provided that the war seems winnable. That means policymakers do not need to abandon a national security commitment as soon as the costs start to mount, provided that the leaders are pursuing a strategy that will lead to success. Leaders should pay more attention to prospects for good outcomes rather than try for cost-free commitments, an impossible standard that the public does not demand and that only hobbles the United States in a dangerous world.
I would say that there remains little evidence that Americans are particularly interested in foreign policy. I think that we “support the troops” but not necessarily the objectives for which the troops have been engaged. Deploying our military more frequently is not the logical implication of that. Deploying our military more prudently is.
Strange indeed! Feaver and friends provide the most ignorant and cruel analysis of Americans’ views on war that I have ever encountered.
I say this because they seem to operate in a moral vacuum regarding death and destruction and blithely discuss what I call Value Free War. They call deaths “costs” and in seemingly total ignorance of recent history claim our leaders will not pursue a long term commitment in a losing situation. That is bizarre, do they know how long were we losing in Afghanistan? They talk about needing our leaders to pursue a strategy that will lead to success. That too is nonsense. America has not pursued such a strategy since WW2. Despite this, Americans have sent their sons and money to every conflict a President has ever unilaterally pursued.
Obviously, their article hit a nerve with me and mainly because I can not understand how what I presume to be educated and knowledgeable people could come up with, let alone publish, such nonsense. From their terminology and if they are correct in what our leaders think of “syndromes ” then I can only conclude that they and the leaders they speak for are those generational elites who have never met an American with a friend or relative below officer ranks in the Armed Forces, let alone met one whose friends and relatives have been killed or wounded in one of our unending conflicts. Perhaps that is how Imperialism works.
My view is that Americans are casualty averse when it comes to dumb wars of choice. I think people intuitively understand that the level of sacrifice ought to align with the stakes of the conflict. For most of our wars, the stakes are not very high, so the prevailing view is that the sacrifices in blood and treasure should be minimal. And that seems completely reasonable to me.
We certainly were not casualty averse with Korea and Viet Nam, which I think is part of the issue. We had vague goals for those two wars and not much to show for them so I think people are more averse to casualties in “dumb wars of choice” as Andy phrased it. It should be noted that we are not quite so averse to inflicting casualties though I think we generally have made a good faith effort to avoid civilian casualties.
Steve,
I think more Americans saw the stakes in Korea and Vietnam as much higher because of the context of the Cold War.
And you look at something like Iraq where the Bush administration’s promotion of the war necessitated raising the stakes. People were not willing to go to war and sacrifice Americans to overthrow a bad dictator, but they were if that bad dictator had WMD.
In addition, Andy, the hard question that must be considered is whether Saddam Hussein would have been a better ally against Islamist terrorism than the present Iraqi government. Alliance with dictators is distasteful, offensive but it’s a distasteful and offensive world. If you only want to deal with nice stuff you should be an isolationist a la ERB’s Beyond Thirty.
At the time, I had spent the last many years covering Iraq and participating in Operation Southern Watch. I was aware, for example, of Saddam’s decision in 1994 to order his military to invade Kuwait again, which was detected by the US, we rushed additional forces in to defend, and Saddam’s generals convinced him to call it off.
By the early 2000’s I’d come to the conclusion that another war was probably inevitable if, for no other reason, than Saddam’s miscalculations. I didn’t believe, and still don’t, that Saddam could have been any kind of ally against Islamic extremism except in the way that any authoritarian government is hostile to challenges to its authority.
At this point, it’s hard to say what would have happened had the US not invaded. Saddam in 2003 was atop a house of cards and completely isolated from what was going on in his own country. Even his own children routinely lied to him. When and how he left the scene, the result would very probably be a civil war, perhaps analogous to Syria, another country in name only.
I suspect that Saddam would never have allowed DAESH to gain the foothold it did in Iraq—because it would have threatened his power. In turn that would mean that a lot of Turkmen, Yazidis, and other ethnic minorities who were particularly targeted by DAESH would still be alive.