Time tunnel

Since I'm going to be back to blogging this weekend, I'll obviously have a few words to say about the new "time horizon" for the American occupation of Iraq. Before I get into the specifics, let me just make a couple of observations that hearken back to the first postings on this blog, early in the Iraq war.

As Fred Ikle nicely summarized in the title of his great little book, Every War Must End. How it ends, of course, is less certain. Wars almost never end in the way the original parties, including the victors, intended. The Iraq war has been an extreme example of that maxim.

Therefore, we're far from being done talking about the beginnings of the Iraq war. All the lessons of this war will be shaped--perhaps warped--by the wide gulf between US war plans and the outcome. In fact, this gulf may make these lessons harder to discern. The murk at the grand strategic and theater levels will obscure many of the successes and failures at the tactical and operational levels.

We are also well on our way to re-creating the emotional and doctrinal chasm that separated Americans after the Vietnam War, to the point where people with differing views often could not have a civil conversation about the subject. Rancor, in large part the deliberate creation of one faction in American politics, is one of the great costs of the Iraq war, because it will make it hard to learn from it. As the Iraq war itself has shown, even learning the lessons of the last war is no obstacle to ignoring or misapplying those lessons. In other words, rancor makes grave risks even greater.

Comments

[Steven Taylor]

Well said.

One of the things that is clearly lost in the current discusion of the topic is the difference between the grand strategic and tactical levels of the conflict. For example, it seems that those who still wish to defend the policy conflate the diminished violence that has taken place post Surge as the same as a broader strategic victory. Indeed, to listen to some, it equals the winning of the war.

[ahuman]

Thank you sir for your insightful perspective.

[joel hanes]

although, you know, the Hundred Years War went on for quite some time, and even the Thirty Years War no doubt became tedious after a while.