"Costly errors give new hope to al-Qaeda"

For John, BLUF:  Can anyone do lessons learned?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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In today's edition of Philadelphia Inquirer is an OpEd on Iraq by Army Veteran John Nagl, who is currently the Headmaster of Haverford School in Philadelphia.  He is the co-author author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.♠  He helped write the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and is the author of the forthcoming Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War.

At any rate, Dr John Nagl knows his Counterinsurgency.  In this OpEd we get a look at what we did or didn't do in Iraq from 2003 on.  The lede and second paragraph:

The dissolution of Iraq is the entirely predictable result of a series of bad American decisions compounded by Iraqi government mistakes.  The result is a disaster for the Iraqi and American people and a gift to radical Islamists worldwide.  Correcting the mistakes will be enormously costly in blood and treasure and will take decades to repair.

The initial and most costly mistake was the decision to invade Iraq in the first place on the misguided belief that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.  Ignoring the history of deterrence, through which states choose not to use these weapons against other states for fear of reprisal, post-9/11 hysteria drove an illogical and destabilizing decision to upset the balance of power in the Middle East with no plan to police the inevitable chaos that followed the invasion.

But, the author says there is plenty of blame to go around, and a warning that we should try to avoid a similar situation in Afghanistan.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  You would think a book like this, published in 2005, would be available in a Kindle Version.  It isn't.  The Army/Marine Corps Field Manual is on Kindle.  Knife Fighters, due out in October, is already advertised as available in a Kindle version.