Why we didn’t achieve true victory in Iraq

Barry McCaffrey has never struck me as particularly sound or insightful, but the criticism he makes here of our inadequate force structure in Iraq seems sensible. He was, of course, advancing similar points during the war, and was proven spectacularly wrong when our relatively small forces won a quick victory. But he is arguably correct about the negative effect of our “Victory Lite” on the aftermath of the war. The goal of war is to crush the enemy’s will to resist, not only for the moment, but for the foreseeable future. And to achieve that, it would appear that we needed less high-tech weaponry, and more William T. Sherman—at least when it came to the Sunni Triangle. McCaffrey writes:

It’s not enough to achieve victory—which we did; you’ve got to achieve a situation in which your adversary recognizes that he’s been defeated, and that violent resistance is futile—which we didn’t. We went in with a small force that, while unstoppable militarily, was incapable of the sort of “takedown” of an entrenched opposition that our troops now face. We should have front-loaded our military power and withdrawn forces as things got better; instead, we went in light, and augmented power after the regime’s fall.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 30, 2003 11:52 PM | Send