PAGE 1Mktg. 4244 country notebook economic templateCoun.docx

Mktg. 4244 country notebook economic template
Country Notebook
Economic Analysis of Jamaica
A- Principal industries
1. what proportion of the GNP does each industry contribute?
2. ratio of private to publicly owned industries
J- Foreign investment
1. opportunities
2. which industries?
K International trade statistics
3. major imports
a- dollar value
b- trends
4. major exports
a- dollar value
b- trends
5. balance of payment situation

a- surplus or deficit
b- recent trends
6. exchange rates
a- single or multiple exchange rate
b- current rate of exchange
c- trends
L- Trade restrictions
1- embargoes
2- quotas
3- import taxes
4- tariffs
5- licensing
6- custom duties
N- Labor force
1. size
2- unemployment rate
O- Inflation rate
I- Developments in science and technology

A- Current technology available (computer, machinery, tools)
B- Percentage of GNP invested in research and development
C- Technological skills of the labor force and general
population
II- Channels of distribution (macro analysis)
This section reports data on all channel middlemen available
within the market.
A- Retailers
1. number of retailers
2. customary mark-up for various classes of goods
3. methods of operation (cash or credit)
4. typical size of retail outlet
5. scale of operations (large or small)
6. role of chain stores, department stores, specialty stores
B- Wholesalers
1. number and size
2. customary mark-up for various classes of goods
3. methods of operation (cash or credit)
C- Import/export agents

D- Warehousing
E- Penetration of urban and rural markets
III- Media
A- availability of media
B- Costs
1. television
2. radio
3. print magazines, newspapers
4. other media (cinema, outdoors, etc.)
C- Agency asístanse
D- Coverage of various media
E- Percentage of population reach by each media
IV- Executive summary
V- Sources of information
VI- Appendix

Lessons Learned
The Iraq Invasion

Andrew J. Bacevich
Jackson Diehl
Michael V. Hayden
Walter Laqueur
Meghan L. O’Sullivan
Richard Perle
David Rieff
Paul D. Wolfowitz
Lessons LearnedLessons Learned
The Iraq Invasion
Andrew J. Bacevich
Jackson Diehl
Michael V. Hayden
Walter Laqueur
Richard Perle
David Rieff
Paul D. Wolfowitz
Lessons Learned
The Iraq Invasion
Andrew J. Bacevich
Jackson Diehl
Michael V. Hayden
Walter Laqueur

Richard Perle
David Rieff
Paul D. Wolfowitz
10 W O R L D A F FA I R S
LESSONS LEARNED
The US war in Iraq began on March 19, 2003. To
mark the tenth anniversary of this momentous
event, one whose ripples will continue to lap on
the shores of American history for decades to
come, World Affairs asked a number of leading
foreign policy thinkers to address the “lessons”
of this war. Their widely differing, but uniformly
interesting responses to this assignment show
that this war is likely to be as contentious a
subject in future assessments as it was when
it began, and that William Faulkner was right
when he famously wrote, “The past is never
dead. It’s not even past.”
— The Editors
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 11
. .

Jackson Diehl is the deputy editorial page editor of the
Washington Post.
Jackson Diehl
So far as official Washington is concerned, the lessons of the
Iraq War
were established and absorbed long ago. Since the 2008
presidential cam-
paign almost no one has disputed Barack Obama’s contention
that Iraq
was “a dumb war,” or the corrective principles he and his
national security
team have adopted.
These might be summed up as follows: (a) the United States
should
never again commit its troops to a conflict in the Middle East,
(b) US-
sponsored “nation building” doesn’t work and is better done at
home,
and (c) any US intervention in a foreign country should be
carried out
indirectly or remotely—through allies, local forces, or drones.
Obama’s “light footprint” doctrine has drawn grumbles from
neocon-
servatives and a few former congressional champions of the Iraq
surge,
such as Senator John McCain. Liberals have challenged the
drone cam-
paign on legal and human rights grounds. But virtually no one
in Washing-
ton now disputes the bottom-line lesson that has congealed into
conven-
tional wisdom. Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert

Gates, summed
it up most pungently in a 2011 speech: “Any future defense
secretary who
advises the president to again send a big American land army
into Asia or
into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”
So Washington thinks it already knows the lessons of Iraq. But
are
those conclusions right? In a political context, probably so: Any
proposal
in 2013 to deploy American ground troops in harm’s way would
almost
certainly be greeted by a bipartisan buzz saw—a reality that the
rulers of
Iran, Syria, and North Korea, among others, seem to have
factored into
their behavior.
Still, the lessons of Iraq, as pursued by Obama, have already
begun to
produce their own problematic results, and demand their own
hard con-
clusions. The time has come to begin debating what might be
called the
lessons of Iraq’s lessons—which, while not necessarily
vindicating George
W. Bush’s post-9/11 interventionism, cast plenty of doubt on
whether the
post-Iraq US strategy for combating Islamic terrorism and the
spread of
weapons of mass destruction is any better.
One clear test of Obama’s no-more-Iraqs doctrine has come in
North
Africa, where successive and related civil wars in Libya and

Mali have
forced decisions about whether and how to respond. In 2011,
Obama very
L E S S O N S L E A R N E D
reluctantly agreed to join an intervention in Libya led by France
and Brit-
ain to help overthrow the regime of Muammar Qaddafi, but he
withdrew
US planes after the opening days of the fight. Similarly, in
January the
White House agreed to back a French intervention in Mali with
transport
and refueling aircraft, but only after a public show of foot-
dragging.
Arguably the first results of Obama’s approach were promising:
The
Qaddafi regime in Libya was ousted by NATO, and al-Qaeda in
the Islam-
ic Magreb (AQIM) was driven out of Mali’s principal cities by
French
troops. But the drawbacks of the “light footprint” have become
increas-
ingly evident in Libya in recent months. Following the end of
the war,
requests by Libya’s new pro-Western authorities for US or
NATO help
with security and training were deflected, and funding requested
by the
Obama administration was held up by Congress. Meanwhile, the

State
Department rejected appeals by the US Embassy in Tripoli for
increased
security, and the Defense Department did not plan or prepare
for the
possibility of a crisis in a country where al-Qaeda–linked
jihadists were
known to be operating.
The catastrophic result was the September 11, 2012, sacking of
the US
mission in Benghazi and the deaths of Ambassador J.
Christopher Stevens
and three other Americans. This was a direct by-product of the
post-Iraq
mind-set and the withholding of resources it led to. Moreover,
the trouble
continues: Thanks to the Libyan government’s incapacity and its
own lack
of assets, the Obama administration not only has been unable to
fulfill the
president’s pledge to bring the Benghazi attackers to justice, but
watched
as the jihadist militia that carried out the attack redeployed in
the city early
in 2013 with impunity. Nor was Washington able to prevent or
respond to
a major terrorist attack in Algeria in January in which thirty-
nine foreign
hostages, including three Americans, were killed.
In other parts of the world, Obama’s standoffish approach is
pro-
ducing substantial political and diplomatic costs, from the
growing anti-
Americanism in Pakistan engendered by drone attacks to the

incipient
crumbling of an Afghan government that can no longer look to
the Unit-
ed States for help in extending its political and economic reach.
Not just
regional partners such as the Persian Gulf states but major allies
such as
France and Israel are questioning whether they can count on the
United
States to act in the event of a crisis with Iran.
The most troubling results of the post-Iraq policy, however, are
appear-
ing in Syria, a country that in many respects resembles its
neighbor. Like
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 13
. .
Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria until 2011 was locked down
under a
brutal dictator who stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and
sought
a nuclear capacity; as in Iraq, the regime was controlled by a
sectarian
minority in a country where Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds and
Christians live
uneasily together.
In Iraq, the US destruction of the dictatorship and mishandling
of
the postwar order opened the way to a sectarian war and the
growth of

an al-Qaeda branch that for a time controlled several cities. Iran
armed
and trained Shiite forces while Gulf states financed the Sunnis.
Tens of
thousands of civilians were slaughtered. Now much of the same
scenario
is unfolding in Syria—with the difference that the United States
has done
nothing either to start or to stanch the carnage.
Seen through the prism of Syria, the war in Iraq already looks
differ-
ent. The sectarian bloodletting and appearance of al-Qaeda seem
less like
the avoidable result of US bungling and more like the inevitable
product
of the breakdown of a 1960s-vintage Arab dictatorship. If Iraq
had, like
Syria, exploded on its own during the first months of the Arab
Spring—as
surely it would have, had Saddam still been in power—the
results likely
would have been similar.
The difference is the presence of US troops, and their role both
in
quickly eliminating the old regime and, eventually, putting an
end to the
sectarian war. In Iraq that effort imposed an undeniably high
price on the
United States: more than forty-four hundred US lives lost, some
thirty-two
thousand wounded, and hundred of billions spent. Yet Iraq
today, despite
continuing violence, is an island of calm compared to Syria, and
no threat

to its neighbors.
In Syria, the costs to the US are mounting fast. An al-Qaeda
affiliate
is rapidly gaining strength; key American allies, including
Turkey, Jordan,
and Israel, are in danger of being drawn into the fighting;
hundreds of
thousands of refugees are pouring across borders; and chemical
weapons
stocks are increasingly insecure.
Already it’s worth speculating about which will ultimately be
seen as
the worse US decision in the post–Cold War Middle East: the
choice to
invade Iraq, or the refusal to intervene in Syria. If the answer
seems obvi-
ous to many in Washington now, that could be because the
lessons of the
lessons of Iraq have yet to be learned.
J a c k s o n D i e h l
Andrew J. Bacevich
The Iraq War teaches many things, but near the top of the list of
lessons that Americans ought to learn (or relearn) is this: It’s
not a black-
and-white world. Statecraft is not a contest pitting innocence

against evil.
It never has been and it never will be. Any nation choosing to
ignore this
fundamental reality courts disappointment at the very least and
may well
invite full-fledged disaster.
From time to time decisionmakers in Washington have chosen
to
believe otherwise (or have made a pretense of doing so). When
he
announced in 1917 that war against the German Reich had
become an
imperative, Woodrow Wilson not only abandoned the policy of
neutrality
that he had steadfastly pursued over the previous two and a half
years, he
also invested the Allied cause with vast (and largely
undeserved) moral
significance. Germany was not just the enemy; it represented a
threat to
civilization itself. Presented with Wilson’s eloquent appeal to
wage a war
that would end all wars, Americans swooned. Yet although the
nation’s
doughboys—“crusaders,” Wilson called them—pitched in to
defeat the
Hun, the results fell well short of those that the president had
envisioned.
Twenty-five years later, with the onset of a second world war,
the good-
versus-evil paradigm came roaring back. To judge from the line
coming
out of Washington by 1942, the Axis powers represented all that
was evil,

while the Allied cause embodied all that was good—freedom
and democ-
racy, respect for human dignity, and adherence to the rule of
law. The
problem with this formulation lay less with the first half than
with the
second. Sustaining it obliged the administration of Franklin
Roosevelt to
soft-pedal the totalitarian and imperialistic tendencies of our
chief allies,
while sweeping American racism under the carpet altogether.
Crimes
against humanity committed by the other side received
appropriate
condemnation. Crimes against humanity committed by our side?
Not so
much. Given the urgency of the situation, the tendency to
permit a double
standard was all but irresistible.
Once again, the white hats prevailed. Yet here too the expected
happy
outcome failed to materialize. Indeed, with the passing of World
War II,
Washington wasted no time in replenishing the ranks of
evildoers, moving
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international
relations at Boston
University. An updated edition of his book The New American
Militarism: How Americans
Are Seduced by War will be published this spring.
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 15

. .
the Soviet Union from the column headed “allies” to the column
headed
“adversaries.” In short order, China followed, along with a
motley crew of
lesser nations, all said to take marching orders from the
Kremlin. By the
time the Korean War erupted, US policymakers—helped along
by anoth-
er Red Scare at home—had once more cast the world in
unambiguously
black-and-white terms.
However useful as a device for mobilizing the American people,
this
Manichaeism also underwrote a penchant for mischief by US
policymak-
ers that exacted heavy costs. Persuaded that the freedom of the
Free
World was at stake in Vietnam, the United States committed
itself to a cat-
astrophically unnecessary and ultimately unsuccessful war.
Persuaded that
anyone opposed to communism must necessarily possess some
redeem-
ing qualities, Washington threw in with a long list of unsavory
autocrats
from Somoza and Batista to Marcos and Chiang. Persuaded that
commie
sympathizers posed a threat to vital US interests in places like
Iran and
Guatemala, Washington toppled governments not to its liking—
and then
professed surprise at the unanticipated adverse consequences.

Again, the urgency of the postwar situation—European
weakness
combined with Stalin’s demands for accommodation as a
prerequisite for
“peace”—may have provided a partial justification for depicting
the situa-
tion in terms that were “clearer than truth,” as Dean Acheson
once put it.
Yet implicit in Acheson’s remark was this assumption: Ordinary
Americans
lack the capacity to deal with nuance and complexity; hence, the
need to
address the public in dumbed-down, oversimplified terms.
Has there ever existed a more useful bogeyman than
“monolithic
communism,” the figment of fevered imaginations employed to
enforce
the Cold War foreign policy consensus? Well, yes, actually.
That would be
“global terrorism,” the product of equally fevered imaginations
employed
to similar effect in the wake of 9/11.
Immediately after the September 11th attacks, whether acting
from
instinct or out of calculation, George W. Bush framed the
problem at
hand as something both frighteningly novel and yet reassuringly
familiar.
The nineteen hijackers had initiated a new round of an old fight,
he told
Americans. Once again, the forces of light stood toe-to-toe with
the forc-
es of darkness. The enemy represented and drew inspiration

from val-
ues that threatened freedom’s very survival. That enemy—not
al-Qaeda
alone, but the much larger enterprise of which al-Qaeda
represented the
radical vanguard—intended to impose those values on the entire
world.
A n d r e w J . B a c e v i c h
So once again, it was us against them in what was going to be—
could not
be other than—a fight to the finish.
“We have seen their kind before,” the president declared. “They
are
the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth
century. By
sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions—by
abandoning every
value except the will to power—they follow in the path of
fascism, Nazism,
and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way,
to where it
ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
Ipso facto, it followed that targeting the organization actually
respon-
sible for the 9/11 attacks would not suffice as a war aim. Much,
much

more was needed. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s
immediate
response, a cryptic note written on September 11th itself,
captures the
administration’s mood. “[G]o massive—sweep it all up, things
related and
not.” Two days later Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz
identified “ending
states” involved in sponsoring terrorism as a primary US policy
objective.
As for President Bush, he was intent on eliminating tyranny
and, indeed,
evil itself, while inter alia removing any last remaining
constraints on the
exercise of American power.
This describes the context in which the administration devised
and
promulgated the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. Bush and his
lieuten-
ants quickly identified Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as an ideal locale
for giving
that doctrine a trial run. Yet Operation Iraqi Freedom turned out
to be a
costly bust, with the reputations of Bush, Rumsfeld, and
Wolfowitz among
the lesser casualties.
How did they get away with perpetrating such a preposterously
stupid
war? Through means not dissimilar to those that Lyndon
Johnson, Rob-
ert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy once employed to
perpetrate an
unnecessary and ill-advised war in Vietnam. Simply put, they
snookered

us. They employed demagoguery to frighten and seduce. To
scare the
American people, they portrayed Saddam Hussein—uninvolved
in the
9/11 plot and himself on Osama bin Laden’s enemies list—as
the equiv-
alent of Adolf Hitler. To seduce their fellow citizens, they
painted Amer-
ica’s intentions toward Iraq as selfless and benign—part of the
nation’s
providential mission to liberate the oppressed and spread the
blessings
of democracy. They either ignored or were themselves oblivious
to vast
historical, religious, sectarian, ethnic, and national complexities
that soon
enough made a mockery of Washington’s portrayal of dragon-
slayers pit-
ted against dragons.
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 17
. .
For Americans, one big lesson of the Iraq War should be this
one:
When policymakers and pundits purport to explain what the
United States
“needs to do” by resorting to hoary old comparisons drawn from
some
mythic past, don’t believe them. Their aim is to manipulate and
deceive.
Whatever problem you’re talking about—did someone say
Iran?—it’s not

simple. And the nation’s purposes, whether measured by past
actions or
future aspirations, do not qualify as altruistic.
Alas, Americans are unlikely to learn this lesson for one simple
reason.
Rather than subjecting the Iraq War to the critical scrutiny it
deserves,
Americans are keen to forget this latest painful episode in their
history.
For that very reason, they can count on being snookered yet
again.
Paul D. Wolfowitz
During the 2000 presidential campaign, candidate George W.
Bush
criticized the Clinton-Gore administration for what he called
efforts at
“nation building” in Somalia and Haiti: “I think our troops
ought to be
used to fight and win war . . . to help overthrow a dictator when
it’s in our
best interests. But in this case, it was a nation-building
exercise.” Twelve
years later, many are saying that the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq would
have been shorter and less costly if we had anticipated the
requirements
of “nation building.” But it could equally be argued that the
idea of
“nation building” is too ambitious and may have helped lead us
into mis-
takes of overreaching.
Not counting Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has

intervened
with its own military forces some ten times in the last thirty
years to wrest
control of a part or all of a foreign country from those in power,
twice
unilaterally (Grenada and Panama) and eight times in some sort
of a
coalition (Kuwait, Northern Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia,
Kosovo, Liberia,
and Libya). In the first four and last two of those ten cases, the
US made
no attempt to stay for a long period or to dictate the subsequent
form of
governance. The local populations managed their political
affairs relative-
ly successfully on their own, albeit in the case of Liberia with
the help of a
very large UN peacekeeping force. Bosnia, and to a lesser
degree Kosovo,
P a u l D . W o l f o w i t z
Paul D. Wolfowitz served as deputy secretary of defense from
2001 to 2005.
are at best mixed successes despite the substantial and extended
presence
of international peacekeeping forces, led by the US. The notable
failures
were Haiti—where the US left quickly but where the country

has struggled
for years despite the assistance of a succession of UN
peacekeeping mis-
sions—and Somalia, where the US, having succeeded at
averting famine,
which had been our original purpose, decided to stay in order to
build
democracy. It was the failure particularly of the latter effort,
with the US
beating a hasty retreat in the face of unexpected combat
casualties, that
gave nation building a bad name in the 1990s.
The experiences with Germany and Japan after World War II are
often
cited as demonstrations of American success at “nation
building.” True,
these countries were governed for many years under a military
occupa-
tion, through which their political systems were completely
restructured.
(In Japan, General MacArthur virtually dictated the terms of the
new con-
stitution.) But that was possible because those countries had
surrendered
unconditionally and the previous regimes were completely
discredited.
Those circumstances are unlikely to be repeated again and they
were not
the circumstances of either Afghanistan or Iraq.
In a prescient memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
in
August of 2002, the late Peter Rodman, then assistant secretary
of defense,
cautioned that planning for Iraq should not look to Germany or

Japan as
examples but rather to postwar France, where the Allies
fortunately aban-
doned plans for a military occupation. Rodman observed that if
the Allies
had gone ahead with the plan for an occupation government,
“the Com-
munists would have . . . taken over the countryside” while the
occupation
“would have neutered the Gaullists.” Instead, de Gaulle was
able to build
up his own movement as a counterweight. While “Iraq has no de
Gaulle,”
he observed, “an occupation government will only delay the
process of
unifying the moderate forces.”
This line of reasoning led to a recommendation that we should
move
as quickly as possible—perhaps even in advance of the war—to
recognize
a provisional Iraqi government that would take charge from the
outset.
The alternative viewpoint was that Iraq needed to be governed
for a multi-
year period, perhaps under UN auspices, by a transitional civil
authority,
to allow for the emergence of new leadership from inside Iraq,
thus
avoiding the imposition of a government composed largely of
what were
labeled “externals,” i.e., Iraqis who had spent the preceding
years in exile
or in liberated Northern Iraq.

M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 19
. .
The initial decision was to create something called the Iraqi
Interim
Authority, which would be more like a provisional government
but which
would not gain control of key ministries, particularly those
controlling
finances and security, until it had demonstrated in less critical
ministries
its ability to manage competently and honestly. However, that
notion was
abandoned after the Coalition Provisional Authority took upon
itself the
role of long-term occupier, a role codified on May 22, 2003, in
UN Reso-
lution 1483. Much debate within the US government was
required before
the decision was made to end the occupation earlier than the
CPA had
planned and transfer sovereign power to an interim Iraqi
government by
the end of June 2004.
We paid a serious price in the eyes of the world for that
prolonged
occupation, particularly in the Arab world, and most
importantly in the
eyes of Iraqis. Moreover, the search for capable and widely
supported
“internal” leaders has to be judged a failure, since the initial
Iraqi govern-
ment was led almost entirely by externals, a situation that

continues today,
even after ten years and a series of national and provincial
elections and
referenda. The most notable “internal” to have emerged is
Moktada al-Sa-
dr, an example that hardly commends the idea.
It was not unreasonable for people to worry about whether
Iraqis
could be counted upon, in the early months after the fall of
Saddam Hus-
sein, to run the new government honestly or competently. But I
believe
that this fear exaggerated the ability of Americans to do better,
partic-
ularly where they lacked anything like a comparable knowledge
of the
country nor even spoke the language. Certainly Iraqis would
have made
mistakes, as they did when sovereignty was finally transferred
after more
than a year of occupation government. But they would have
been Iraqi
mistakes. American mistakes were more consequential, because
they
allowed Iraqis to turn their anger on the occupiers rather than
accept
responsibility for their own affairs.
Of course, one key characteristic of both Afghanistan and
Iraq—one
we did not have to confront in Japan, Germany, or any of the
other exam-
ples mentioned above—was the existence of a virulent
insurgency deter-
mined to restore the previous regime in some form. In the face

of that
threat, it was a critical mistake in 2003 to focus the effort of
rebuilding
Iraq’s own army solely on the mission of external defense.
That is a mistake that Iraqis themselves would not have made.
When I
met with Iraq’s soon-to-be Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi
in Baghdad
in June of 2004, to discuss plans for security forces after the
transition to
P a u l D . W o l f o w i t z
Iraqi sovereignty, he stressed the importance of devoting the
Iraqi army
primarily to internal security. I was delighted that I had the
authority to
tell him that the US agreed with this idea.
Unfortunately, by that time the insurgents had more than a
year’s head
start, a lead that was never really overcome until, with the
surge, Gener-
al David Petraeus brought additional resources to the task of
training
and organizing Iraqis. Fortunately, that task was entrusted to an
unsung
American hero, Lieutenant General James Dubik, who was able
roughly

to double the size of the Iraqi army over the course of 2007,
while at the
same time improving its quality.
In Afghanistan we avoided the mistake of establishing an
occupation
government at the outset. And, for all of the weaknesses of the
Karzai gov-
ernment, the effort there benefited from having an Afghan
government
as a partner, particularly in the early years. But, for a number of
reasons,
including the fact that the Taliban insurgency took some time to
gather
strength, we underestimated the need for Afghan security forces
as well. As
in Iraq, it was only with the additional resources available from
the Afghan
surge and with inspired leadership by another American
lieutenant gen-
eral, William Caldwell, that the US was finally able to build up
the Afghan
security forces to their present size of more than three hundred
thousand,
while also improving their quality.
The additional resources provided by the surges, first in Iraq
and then
in Afghanistan, were important for getting the training mission
right.
But more important than the relatively small increase in
resources was
the recognition of the importance of the mission. Although our
military
has developed substantial capability in the area of training
indigenous

military forces—the mission carries the acronym FID, for
Foreign Inter-
nal Defense—that is not a mission that normally captures the
attention
of the most promising and ambitious fighters. It is more
satisfying, both
personally and professionally, to train soldiers to the very high
standards
of the US military and to lead them in action than to deal with
the frus-
trations and compromises of what may dismissively be called
“third-world
militaries.” Yet those militaries are often the key to success and
the key to
minimizing our own losses. So, FID is a mission we must
cultivate for the
present and the future.
Already, I believe, the Obama administration seems so intent on
avoid-
ing anything that looks like what George W. Bush might have
done that
the US failed to do much to help a very moderate government in
Libya
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 21
. .
to stand up the security forces that could stabilize the country
(and which
might have prevented the tragedy in Benghazi). And, by doing
almost
nothing to help the free Syrians strengthen their military

capability, we
have dangerously increased the risk of a post-Assad government
falling
into the hands of the most extreme armed groups.
Hopefully we will never again have to send American ground
forces to
assist a friendly government to resist the onslaught of a
determined insur-
gency. But with so many important countries in such a state of
turmoil,
there is no way to be certain. If we ever do face such a
situation, we should
remember the importance of political legitimacy for our local
allies. We
should think long and hard before imposing another occupation
govern-
ment. And we should not waste any time in establishing the
most capable
possible indigenous security forces.
Finally, if we must send American combat troops into such a
situa-
tion, they should be trained and equipped for
counterinsurgency, not
for peacekeeping. As we unavoidably draw down some of the
marvelous
counterinsurgency forces that we have developed over the past
decade,
it would be a mistake to abandon the capability completely.
Despite our
most heartfelt hopes, we may need it again some day.
David Rieff
Nearly ten years on from the Iraq invasion, what have we

learned?
The simple answer, I’m sorry to say, is not much. Lest it be
forgotten,
the Bush administration went to war to topple Saddam Hussein
with
broad bipartisan support from Congress, notably from the
presumptive
front-runner for the presidency in 2016, Hillary Clinton, who
has sedu-
lously refused ever since to concede that her support in favor of
the Octo-
ber 2002 Iraq War Resolution was mistaken. The war was also
supported
by a great many of the most important national media outlets,
most nota-
bly the New York Times, that on most other matters at the time
tended to
be critical of the Bush administration from a liberal-progressive
perspec-
tive. Unlike former Secretary of State Clinton, most of these
journalistic
institutions have since recanted.
What is not obvious is how much, if indeed anything at all,
should be
D a v i d R i e f f
David Rieff is a journalist and author. He is finishing a book on
the global food crisis.

read into these second thoughts. Meanwhile, although many
neoconser-
vatives and so-called national-greatness conservatives, both
within and
outside the Republican Party, would concede with benefit of
hindsight
that the Bush administration bungled the occupation of Iraq,
few have
reconsidered their support for military interventions abroad, not
only to
further direct US interests, or preempt or prevent war, but also
to topple
dictatorships in the name of human rights and humanitarian
necessity.
To be sure, the difficulty of such interventions is now broadly
acknowl-
edged. It is inconceivable, for example, that were the Obama
administra-
tion to decide to intervene militarily in Syria, a senior Pentagon
official
would adamantly insist before Congress that prosecuting such a
war suc-
cessfully, then securing a durable post-conflict settlement in its
aftermath,
would be comparatively easy and that the costs of both these
enterprises
would be negligible, in the way that Bush officials did
repeatedly in tes-
timony before both the House and the Senate in the run-up to
the Iraq
War. So perhaps one can say that American policymakers have
learned
that imposing democratic order at the point of a gun is more
difficult than

they assumed it was in 2003. But does this mean they have
repudiated such
projects altogether, let alone questioned whether it really is the
business of
the United States to go abroad and, to paraphrase John Quincy
Adams’s
celebrated formulations, use military force to champion and
vindicate the
liberty of others? The answer to that is an emphatic “No.”
For despite all the complaints from the right about the Obama
admin-
istration’s supposed retreat, the dominant view in Washington
remains
that version of the doctrine of American exceptionalism which
holds, con-
tra Adams, that if there are indeed monsters out there beyond
the nation’s
borders, then, within the bounds of feasibility, it is both the
duty and the
right of the United States to find and destroy them. To put it
another way,
the US intervention in Iraq soured policymakers and mainstream
pundits
on Iraq, not on intervention itself. To the contrary, between
2005 and
2013, the same powerful coalitions that were assembled to push
for Sadd-
am Hussein’s overthrow have reassembled unsuccessfully to
press for mili-
tary action in Darfur, successfully for a campaign to overthrow
the Qaddafi
regime in Libya (with the disastrous and entirely predictable
blowback
effects now unfolding in Mali and that will soon become evident
elsewhere

in the Sahel), and now in Syria, though there, despite pressure
from both
Republicans in Congress and liberal interventionists both inside
and out-
side his administration, President Obama seems, as of this
writing at least,
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 23
. .
to have dug in his heels. To put it starkly, with respect to
interventions on
the Iraq model, there has been no “Never Again” moment,
except in the
sense that—mirabile dictu!—there is indeed a strong consensus
in Wash-
ington now that never again should an American army be sent to
Iraq to
overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Perhaps none of this should be surprising. It took Britain and
France
a considerable time to get used to their reduced place in the
world after
the dissolution of their colonial empires (though the French
have done
this far more successfully than the British, whose elite—think
of Tony
Blair—continue to cling to the fantasy of the UK being Greece
to Amer-
ica’s Rome). After almost a century of hegemony, the political
elite in
the United States are not yet ready to come to terms with the

nation’s
comparative decline and with what the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have
actually revealed, which, former Vice President Cheney’s florid
fantasies
to the contrary notwithstanding, is not what we as a nation can
do if we set
our mind to it, but instead what we cannot do even if we have
set our mind
to it. Liberals and conservatives continue to want to speak as if
it were the
1990s and the question is not whether we can intervene
successfully, but
only whether or not we will choose to do so. But instead, it is
2013, and
the greatest nation in the history of the world, as American
exceptionalists
like to say, is certainly great in one respect: we are now the
greatest debt-
or nation in the history of the world. And political structures
seem to be
decaying as fast as our physical infrastructure.
What should happen? The United States should learn to live
within its
means, not just economically, but militarily, and in terms of its
ideological
self-conception. That would mean no more so-called wars of
choice, no
more fantasies of omnipotence whose greatest manifestation is a
military
budget so much greater than that required for national self-
defense and
for essential national interests such as the capacity to keep the
sea lanes
and the skies open for global trade—yes, by force if

necessary—and no
more mortgaging of the nation’s future in the name of empire,
idealism,
or, in the American case, of both. But will this happen? Almost
certain-
ly not. Like the old Soviet Union, we cling to our old ways and
our old
conceits, pretending to ourselves that the world is still what it
was when
our word was law. It will take more than a failed war in Iraq
and a stu-
pid and wasteful occupation of Afghanistan to change that.
Dreams die
hard, and American exceptionalism, that is to say, the American
dream,
dies hardest of all.
D a v i d R i e f f
Walter Laqueur
Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003. Less than
four
months later, on July 9th, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld reported
to the congressional armed forces committee on the lessons of
Iraq. Since
then, there have been hundreds, probably thousands, of such
reports,
analyses, investigations, postmortems, and such.

During the early period, they were mostly of a military-
technical nature,
concerning the effects of weapons systems. By 2004–2005, the
emphasis of
the lessons had shifted to political issues. (Had the postwar
planning been
sufficiently thorough? Had it been wise to disband the Iraqi
army and to
engage in wholesale de-Baathification?) The debate became
more and
more politicized. Although the official aim of the campaign had
been to
destroy the weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s
arsenal, no
such weapons were found. Did this mean that the allegations
had been a
deliberate lie, a pretext by neoconservatives to produce a
plausible case
for going to war and to bring about regime change? Or had there
been a
genuine intelligence failure?
Eventually the debate over the lessons of Iraq focused on which
were
right and which were wrong. By 2009, articles began to appear
in profession-
al journals with titles like “Forget the Lessons of Iraq” (Armed
Forces Journal).
There are, of course, lessons to be learned from Iraq—some of a
mil-
itary-technical character, such as whether certain new weapons
systems
work, whether they should be discarded or improved. There are
questions

of a more general character, but not all of them have clear
answers. It is
probably correct that the planning for the postwar period was
not as good
as the military preparations. But could there have been better
political
planning? How could it have been assured that Saddam
Hussein’s regime
would be replaced by a more democratic or at least less
aggressive one,
how to assure that the defeat of the Baathist regime would not
bring about
a strengthening of Iran, that is to say a regime equally
repressive and
aggressive—or even worse?
This question was bound to come up time and again in the
Middle
East—but not only there. Could a democratic regime be imposed
from the
outside on societies without democratic traditions and
institutions, coun-
tries deeply split internally on religious, ethnic, tribal lines?
This problem
Walter Laqueur is the author, most recently, of After the Fall:
The End of the European Dream
and the Decline of a Continent.
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 25
. .
appeared even in the case of preventing proliferation: Why

prevent Iraq
from acquiring weapons of mass destruction if there was no
willingness (or
possibility) to act with the same determination in the case of
Iran?
American policy in the case of Iraq suffered from what some
neurosci-
entists call “optimism bias,” in this case the tacit assumption
that following
the deposition of the old undesirable rulers things would
somehow fall
in their place. In the case of Iraq, the optimism bias was
initially strong,
mainly among those of a right-wing persuasion. More recently it
has been
prevalent above all among the left—hoping (frequently against
hope) that
“engagement,” diplomatic approaches, and concessions would
solve con-
flicts, be they in the Far East or the Middle East or other parts
of the globe.
In the case of the Arab Spring (to give but one example) it was
argued, particularly in Europe, that the movement toward
greater free-
dom always took time and was accompanied by setbacks. This is
perfectly
true but it tends to omit from view that Europe is heir to a
political tra-
dition quite different from the Middle East’s and that even in
Europe it
took almost a century after the revolutions of 1848 until
democracy and
peace were firmly anchored.

At present the main lesson to be learned from Iraq is probably a
neg-
ative one—that “parataxic distortion” should be avoided. This is
a fancy
term coined by one school of American psychoanalysis.
Translated into
plain English, its lesson is to avoid the example of the cat that,
having
burned itself as the result of sitting down on a very hot stove,
will avoid all
future stoves even if they are very cold. Strategists (and
political scientists)
are forever searching for common denominators, laws, and
lessons to be
learned. Historians know from bitter experience that each
historical situ-
ation is sui generis, differing in essential aspects from previous
ones. Weap-
ons systems are the same whether used in Asia, Africa, or the
Antarctic
(perfectionists may dissent even from this proposition), but the
political,
social, geographical situation is different in each case. What
was true with
regard to Afghanistan does not apply to Mali—the former is
ideal guerrilla
country whereas the Sahara desert is not. There are no jungles,
no forests,
no megacities, few mountains to hide—and few targets to
attack.
There are some universally valid lessons to draw from Iraq but
they are
so obvious that one hesitates even to repeat them: That
countries should
get involved in armed conflicts only when immediate national

interests are
at stake, that if involvement does take place it should be carried
out with
overwhelming force (and may have to be repeated), that there
should be
Wa l t e r L a q u e u r
no illusions concerning nation building and the imposition of
democratic
regimes from the outside. That in each case the risks of action
should be
weighed—but also the risks of inaction. And so on.
Some of these self-evident truths have been ignored in the past
and as
a result the present strong trend is toward withdrawal and
inaction. This
could have been foreseen. The question then arises—what are
the vital
national interests, how far should a withdrawal go? The present
writer is
not among the leading admirers of Oswald Spengler, but
Spengler was not
always wrong. He was right, for instance, when he wrote that
trying to opt
out of world politics does not necessarily offer protection
against suffering
from the effects of world politics.

Richard Perle
Not only has the most important “lesson” to arise from the
invasion
of Iraq a decade ago not been learned, it has gone largely
unnoticed. The
lesson is this: Without a political strategy to deal with our
adversaries, any
last resort to force, when it comes, will cost more, achieve less,
and dimin-
ish or even destroy the prospects for victory.
From Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to the 9/11 attack in
2001, what
passed for an American Iraq policy was a misplaced belief that
an increas-
ingly shaky sanctions regime could “contain” Iraq and render
Saddam
Hussein harmless. Successive American administrations had
shown no
interest in working with Hussein’s opponents inside or outside
Iraq and
when, despite administration opposition, Congress passed the
Iraq Liber-
ation Act in 1998, President Clinton gave lip service to its call
for regime
change while doing nothing substantial to bring it about.
When George W. Bush took office, top officials recognized that
the
Iraq sanctions were losing international support, and that the
risks of
maintaining “no flight zones” over Iraq were increasing
(Hussein’s forces
were firing daily at the US and British aircraft patrolling the
zones and it

seemed a matter of time before they would score a lucky hit).
This com-
pelled a review of Iraq policy. Some officials wanted to
reaffirm the policy
Richard Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute. He served as
assistant secretary of defense for international security policy
from 1981 to 1987 and
afterward as a member of the Defense Policy Board, including
three years as chairman.
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 27
. .
inherited from the Bush senior and Clinton administrations: no
interest
in bringing down the regime, no alliance with Hussein’s
opponents. Secre-
tary of State Colin Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff in
1991 had preferred leaving Hussein in power to removing him
by continu-
ing the Desert Storm offensive, proposed no alternative to the
status quo
containment policy. If he had his way, the United States would
make no
real effort to work with the regime’s opponents. He hoped that
Hussein
would be contained, notwithstanding the well-known Pentagon
maxim
that hope is not a strategy.

Having failed to anticipate any attack on the scale of 9/11,
however,
we were suddenly faced with the danger of the next attack,
perhaps with
weapons of mass destruction. So the administration did the
obvious thing.
It made up a list of all the terrorist organizations and terrorist-
supporting
states who had both motive and means to inflict a devastating
attack on
the US, and searched for policies that could protect us against
them.
Iraq was high on the list. Saddam Hussein had vigorously
applaud-
ed the 9/11 attack. He had actually used weapons of mass
destruction
already, killing thousands in an infamous chemical weapons
attack on the
Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988. He had extensive
relationships with ter-
rorists—Abu Nidal, for example, was living and working in
Baghdad. All
Western intelligence organizations believed that Hussein had
stockpiles of
chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear weapons
program,
and his government made reliable international inspections
difficult or
impossible. Could he—would he—make WMD available to
terrorists for
use against the United States? The question had become urgent.
The Iraqi
expatriate and Kurdish opposition that we had failed to assist or
organize
was not sufficiently coordinated or capable to counter the threat

for us. It
was too late to deal with Iraq by political means. After months
of addition-
al fruitless diplomacy (building on nearly a dozen years of less-
than-effec-
tive “containment” efforts by the UN Security Council),
President Bush
concluded that only the military option remained.
Unwilling to leave Hussein in place and simply hope for the
best,
the administration decided to remove Saddam and his sons from
power,
using a multinational coalition that eventually numbered forty-
nine coun-
tries but did not include a significant Iraqi opposition force
alongside
the US and coalition forces.
We will never know whether a political strategy of regime
change
could have succeeded in the years before 9/11. We never tried.
But we do
R i c h a r d P e r l e
know that we were hopelessly ill prepared for the costly
occupation that
followed the war. Having failed to develop a working
relationship with

Hussein’s opponents before the invasion, and knowing little
about Iraqi
culture, society, and politics, we made one mistake after another
as several
thousand well-intentioned Americans, some of whom had never
traveled
outside the United States, descended on and remained isolated
in the
protected “Green Zone” in Baghdad, sent there to govern a
country of
which we knew little.
For many of us who believed the risk of leaving Hussein in
place after
9/11 was unacceptable, the American occupation of Iraq was
excruciating.
The insurgency mobilized against it took the lives of thousands
of brave
Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The
insurgency might
never have gotten off the ground (for five months after Baghdad
fell,
there was no insurgency) if we had turned governmental
authority over
to the Iraqis soon after grateful Iraqis pulled down Hussein’s
statues and
monuments. But we hardly knew the Iraqis, and the State
Department and
CIA officials who had long opposed working with them
distrusted them
with far more passion than reason. An Iraqi government would
surely have
made mistakes, but I doubt it would have proved as inept as the
ineffectual
occupation leadership sequestered in the Green Zone.

For years before 9/11 made invasion our only option in Iraq, we
failed
to develop a political strategy for dealing with Hussein. And for
years after
Baghdad fell, we compounded that failure as occupiers.
Far from learning from that bitter experience, however, we
repeat it
with alarming frequency, especially now, after uprisings have
remade the
Arab world. In Libya we were not even thinking about a
political strategy
when the anti-Qaddafi uprising drew us (albeit leading from
behind)
into yet another Middle Eastern military operation. We dithered
until the
situation was desperate, then jumped in without connections to
Libyan
allies that we knew and could trust. Administration officials
explained our
delayed response, which made the outcome more costly and the
eventual
consequences less predictable, by saying that we didn’t know
who among
the rebels we should back. Of course we didn’t—just as we had
not known
who to work with in Iraq.
And now Iran. We have an obvious interest in preventing an
Iranian
nuclear weapons capability and ending Iran’s support for
international
terrorism. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime is intensely
unpopular. Yet,
astonishingly, our government has no political strategy for Iran.
President

M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 29
. .
Obama’s response to the massive (and potentially regime-
changing) pro-
tests in June 2009 was one of studied indifference. Eventually
the sheer
size of the protests and the regime’s bloody response elicited a
reluctant
statement criticizing the government’s brutality. But we should
have
begun to work with the Iranian opposition years ago, just as we
should
have worked with the oppositions in Libya and Iraq.
As in the case of Iraq a decade ago, we are again facing dangers
for
which we lack a sensible political strategy, leaving us either to
accept the
unacceptable, a nuclear-armed Iran, or turn to a costly “last
resort,” to mil-
itary operations. Lessons learned may be painful, but lessons
unlearned
are inexcusable.
Michael V. Hayden
Few geo-strategic and geo-political judgments on lessons
learned from
the Iraq War are likely to top, at least in sheer starkness,
Defense Secretary
Robert Gates’s valedictory statement that “any future defense

secretary
who advises the president to again send a big American land
army into
Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head
examined.”
I’m not even going to try to top that one. Besides, I’m the intel
guy,
not a policy wonk, and ten years may not be enough time for the
really big
lessons of Iraq or anywhere else to have ripened. So, instead,
I’m going to
look at “lessons learned” though an intelligence rather than a
policy lens.
First of all, there is the October 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate on
weapons of mass destruction. Just to be clear, I was in the room
when it was
approved. I voted yes. I had earlier told Condoleezza Rice, the
national
security adviser, that the National Security Agency (where I
was director
at the time) had mountains of evidence on Saddam Hussein’s
WMD pro-
gram. The problem was that it was all circumstantial rather than
definitive.
Recent accounts claim that Michael Morell, deputy director of
the
CIA, has commented that evidence that Osama bin Laden was
living in
Abbottabad was equally circumstantial. In fact, we may have
had stronger
evidence on Iraqi WMD that we had on bin Laden’s location.

What is most striking about the 2002 estimate is not that it was
wrong
M i c h a e l V. H a y d e n
Michael V. Hayden was director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009.
(which it certainly was), but that the language of the estimate
was so
unambiguous. We had our footnotes from State Department and
Energy
dissenting on “aluminum tubes” and the nuclear weapons
program, but
in retrospect the language is clearly over-confident and the
unsuspecting
policymaker leaning on this intelligence is given a false sense
of certainty.
Lesson learned: Share your doubts.
A second lesson: When America enters a fight, the distinctions
between
tactical and strategic (or national) become meaningless. As I
said, I was
director of the National Security Agency at the time of the
invasion of Iraq
and doctrinally I was charged with supporting the national
leadership and
Department of Defense echelons down to about the corps level.
Doctrine didn’t work. My chief of research came back from a

week-
plus visit to Iraq with a troubling report card. They loved us at
MNFI (the
multinational force headquarters), tolerated us at division, and
below that
barely knew who we were.
Shortly thereafter, we imbedded NSA teams down to the
regimental
(in the Marine Corps) and brigade (in the Army) levels, and
became
integral to those units’ organic intelligence assets. Low-echelon
GIs were
tweaking and pointing the most precious national assets for
their imme-
diate tactical needs. Lesson learned: doctrine be damned; do
whatever it
takes. In signals intelligence as in policy, the formerly tactical
had become
strategic and vice versa.
A third lesson: An outgrowth of this kind of integration was the
inev-
itable blending of intelligence and operations, of what are
known as US
Code Title 10 authorities (traditional military activities) and
Title 50
authorities (traditional intelligence activities, including covert
action).
In 2006, within a few days of US special operations forces
killing
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the notorious leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq,
I (then
director of the CIA) received a hand-written personal note from
Stanley

McChrystal, then head of Joint Special Operations Command. It
was a
simple “thank you.”
As CIA director, I visited various intelligence centers in Iraq
and
Afghanistan. They were all impressive. As I was about to exit a
facility, I
generally would pause, look over my shoulder, and ask, “Hey,
who here
works for me?” In other words, the previous two hours of the
visit had not
given me any indicator of who was who. It was just one team.
That was a
measure of our integration.
Much has been made of this, and some members of Congress
have
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 31
. .
complained that similar if not identical activities have been
arbitrarily
booked under Defense Department or intelligence authorities
and hence
fall under the oversight of either the intelligence or armed
services com-
mittees—but not both.
Lesson learned: Get beyond this. Operationally successful
arrange-
ments should not be put at risk to protect congressional

prerogatives.
Oversight is essential but its structure should reflect operational
impera-
tives, not the other way around.
Lesson four: Intelligence support for a preemption strategy is
really
hard. The Bush administration famously described it as a duty
to “antic-
ipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power,
before the
threats can do grave damage” (emphasis added). For me, in the
simplest
terms, that raised the question of how good American
intelligence would
have to be to identify such threats and to identify them at a
confidence
level that would justify America shooting first.
Intelligence is always designed to inform policymakers, but it
usually
does so in the face of continuing doubt. It enables action even
in the
face of ambiguity. This looked different; this looked like
intelligence
as evidence.
And before anyone is tempted to dismiss this as a peculiar Bush
admin-
istration or Iraq War phenomenon, consider the present
administration’s
policy toward Iran and its nuclear program. President Obama
has rejected
containment and has promised not to allow Iran to acquire a
weapon—all
of which will require intelligence to be able to “anticipate and

counter”
this threat before it materializes. For the intel guy, that
challenge has the
feel of Iraq WMD redux.
One final lesson, or perhaps an “un-lesson.” With the country at
war
for eleven years, much of American intelligence has been
shaped to sup-
port brave young Americans in harm’s way. Much of what now
passes for
analysis is really targeting. I told David Petraeus shortly before
his con-
firmation hearings that the CIA never looked more like its
World War II
predecessor, the OSS, than it did today.
These are good things. But it is also good to remember that the
CIA is
not the OSS; it’s the nation’s global espionage and analytic
service. And if
it and the rest of the intelligence community do not remember
and tend
to these broader roles, the nation will be the worse for it. That’s
another
lesson worth heeding.
M i c h a e l V. H a y d e n

A decade after the removal of Saddam Hussein, we still appear
reluc-
tant to embrace one of the central lessons of Iraq: that regime
change
necessitates nation building. This lesson—and the many
subsidiary lessons
that flow from it—is of real relevance to what is happening in
the Arab
world today. In Libya, the international community sought to
distance
itself from this reality and the consequences of doing so are
becoming
apparent. In Syria, the almost obsessive focus on Assad
suggests that few
policymakers are prepared to talk about the huge effort—by
Syrians and
the international community—that will need to follow Assad’s
fall, instead
preferring to focus on the comparatively limited goal of
removing him.
The Bush administration went into both Iraq and Afghanistan
large-
ly on the grounds of protecting and advancing other national
security
interests, with little expectation these efforts would involve a
decade-
plus of nation building. While the intention was to replace
Saddam
Hussein and the Taliban with more representative and even
democratic
regimes, in neither case was this the primary reason for going to
war, nor
did the US government anticipate spending large amounts of
time or

resources to this end.
In Iraq, initial assumptions focused on the well-developed
bureaucra-
cies of the Iraqi state and the expectation that Iraq’s institutions
would
largely stay intact, ready for use by a more friendly, benevolent
set of new
rulers. While fewer institutions seemed to exist in Afghanistan,
policymak-
ers counted on the loya jirga (assembly) to legitimate the
assumption of
power by a new government.
Although not anticipated by those planning to remove Hussein,
the
intense focus on nation building following the removal of a
longstand-
ing dictator is, in retrospect, not surprising. As the Iraq
experience has
made so clear, the institutions of a repressive regime are
unlikely to stay
in place and function semi-normally once the regime is
decapitated.
The institutions of dictatorial states are not the same as those of
modern
nation-states; they may well not survive their patrons. In Iraq,
Hussein
had spent nearly thirty years hollowing out the institutions of
the Iraqi
state and refashioning them for the sole purpose of protecting
and
Meghan L. O’Sullivan is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the
Practice of International
Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School and was deputy national

security adviser for Iraq
and Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. She spent two years in Iraq
between 2003 and 2008.
M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 3 33
. .
perpetuating his rule. When he fled Baghdad, these institutions
quickly
collapsed. Iraqis took to the streets and to their workplaces
looking to
pillage state buildings, over which they felt no ownership;
because no law
was believed to be larger than Hussein’s regime, with his
departure, the
country lapsed into lawlessness almost overnight.
Moreover, even in other situations where institutions outlive the
down-
fall of a brutal regime, their survival may not be welcome or
necessarily
constructive. Very few peoples who endure a repressive regime
are going
to be content to adopt the security and other structures of the
old state,
even after the strongman has been deposed. For instance, the
most vocal
advocates for the “disbanding” of the Iraqi army were the
Kurds, who had
suffered genocidal acts at its hands. Expecting them to accept
Hussein’s
old army as the army of a new Iraq was a fantasy. And so, for
similar rea-

sons, is the hope of some outside powers that Syrians will retain
the army
and other institutions custom-built by the Assad dynasty after
decades of
oppression and an especially vicious rear-guard civil war over
the last two
years. In the rare instance, Egypt, where security institutions
outlived the
ruler, their strength and dominance led many Egyptians to
lament that
their revolution turned into a coup.
The real lessons from Iraq are not about how the institutions of
the
old regime should be maintained, but pertain to how and how
not to take
such institutions apart. Perhaps the most important lesson is that
the old
institutions, particularly in the security domain, should not be
dismantled
without anything to take their place. The greatest problem
surrounding
the disbanding of the Iraqi army was not simply alienating tens
of thou-
sands of highly trained Sunnis, many of whom later became
sympathetic
to the insurgency. Rather, it was upending the security order
without
offering any other workable arrangements in its place. Plans to
build a
new Iraqi army were slow and, at least initially, ill conceived.
And yet the
US-led coalition was at first unwilling to provide the security
needed in the
interim while a new Iraqi force grew in capability. In part, it
was this vac-

uum that invited sectarianism and its militarization—and led to
a vicious
sectarian war in 2006.
If some dismantling of the state—either as part of the regime-
change
process or its aftermath—is inevitable, then nation building
must neces-
sarily follow. True, there is nothing that automatically requires
that new
institutions are democratic. But Iraq’s experience demonstrates
the very
strong pressures that will exist in that direction, even if one sets
aside
M e g h a n L . O ’ S u l l i v a n
normative preferences for democracy. First, after decades of
repression,
people will desire accountability in their next government,
perhaps above
all else. Second, in all likelihood, these new societies will need
to cope
with significant societal divisions—either evident or newly
“discovered”
after years of such differences being suppressed. There is, in
fact, no bet-
ter form of governance for both promoting accountability and
balancing
power in highly divided societies than democracy. Finally, as in

the exam-
ple of Iraq, people will press for early elections, not out of
ideology or
even necessarily a love of democracy, but out of a need to
determine who
has the credibility to lead the country through a transitional
process.
Another clear lesson from Iraq is that security is the basis on
which all
other forms of progress—political, economic, diplomatic—rest.
Part of
the reason for the failed US strategy from 2003 to 2006 was that
the Bush
administration pursued a strategy predicated on the idea that
political
achievements would drive security gains. While this may be true
at certain
levels of development, in situations of dramatic physical
insecurity, violence
reinforces the power of sect, ethnic group, and tribe over the
broader ideas
of nation and state, which otherwise might motivate the
founders of any
new or reborn country. The Bush administration’s revision of its
core stra-
tegic assumptions to focus on security as a precursor to
effective politics,
rather than vice versa, underpinned the adoption of the “surge”
strategy—
which contributed to dramatic improvements in Iraq beginning
in 2007.
In sum, one of the clearest overall lessons coming out of Iraq is
that
one should never think that regime change is a discrete task—

that declar-
ing victory can follow the simple removal of a horrific leader.
By whatever
means that leader goes, the hard work of both dealing with the
institutions
of the old regime and remaking the institutions of the new state
must fol-
low. The challenge, as Iraq has made abundantly clear, is that
while some
institutions must be dismantled, the new ones that take their
place cannot
be created overnight. This transition creates a period of extreme
vulner-
ability, when spoilers can exploit vacuums. Some countries will
be able to
weather this period on their own, but others will require
extensive exter-
nal help to bridge the gap from regime change to peace and
prosperity.
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