ABSTRACT
In March 2003, President George W. Bush and his closest advisors elected to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein and his “regime” from power. The war was unnecessary and the execution of postconfl ict operations demonstrated a remarkable level of incompetence. Saddam Hussein was a threat to the security of the United States and other states in the region; however, he was not the threat the Bush Administration made him into, and there was nothing he possessed that could not be destroyed from the air. 3 Militarily, Saddam Hussein, while a threat, was contained. Charles Duelfer, who interviewed Saddam Hussein after his capture, wrote:
The problem posed by the Saddam regime was not diminishing. We now know he retained his aspiration for WMD. Saddam told us after the war that he would “do whatever is necessary” to respond to comparable threats from his neighbors such as Iran and Israel. However, even without WMD, Saddam could have caused major problems. 4
Aspirations do not generate combat power, and Saddam Hussein, while a problem, had no WMDs and could have been managed without recourse to war. However, Saddam Hussein was not contained economically. UN sanctions and the Oil-for-Food
program were not working. Charles Duelfer, Deputy Chairman of the UN Weapons Inspection Organization, wrote:
But by 2001, it was becoming obvious that the sanctions path was leading to nowhere. Saddam was successfully manipulating people and governments in 1999-2002-when the price of oil averaged well under $30 a barrel. . . . Saddam channeled that illicit income into rebuilding his security services, regime structure, and weapons programs, including prohibited ballistic missiles. 5
In the development of their strategy and plans, Bush and his advisors made a number of assumptions, which proved to be wrong. They believed the war would be short and easy, and that the military power of the United States was so overwhelming they could dictate the course of the war. They believed that unilaterally they could change the course of the history of a foreign state and culture, and, indeed, the entire Middle East region. They believed the war would pay for itself, with the oil wealth of the invaded state. They believed the Iraqi people would be grateful and greet them as liberators. They did not think it was necessary to understand the peoples whose lands they were invading, the dynamic of their social and political systems, or the condition of the infrastructure of the country. Nor did they seek to understand the nature of war against Muslims in the Middle East. They thought primarily of men and machines, technology and logistics, space and time, and their own plans. The war, however, was a chameleon. And by trying to impose their will upon Saddam Hussein’s government, with too little attention to the people, the culture, the region, or the degraded state of Iraq, Bush and his senior-most advisors totally failed to see what they were looking at. They misjudged the situation, and the cost of the war. They missed and destroyed numerous opportunities to share the burden of the war with other states to preclude the insurgency war. The Bush Administration, like the Johnson Administration, placed too much faith in military solutions based on advanced technologies, and by doing so, it grossly misread the situation in Iraq.
