Friedberg says multiple mistakes lower chances of success in Iraq

Correction appended

Four years after invading Iraq, the United States faces dwindling chances for success in a mission that has been marked by mistakes, a former Bush administration adviser argued during a panel discussion yesterday.

"The problem was not so much a failure of planning but a failure of imagination," said Wilson School professor Aaron Friedberg, a former deputy assistant for national security affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney. "[It was a] failure to think through what might happen once military operations were completed."

Friedberg spoke about war policy alongside another Wilson School professor, Gary Bass, in a discussion moderated by politics professor Alan Patten. The event attracted a crowd of a few dozen students and faculty in Corwin Hall.

Friedberg cited the inability of the Bush administration to plan for the Sunni insurgency after Saddam Hussein's regime fell, along with its subsequent inability to prevent the Shiites from retaliating. These oversights, he said, have imperiled almost all attempts at meaningful political reconciliation in Iraq.

He mentioned other, more specific criticisms of the administration's handling of the war, including presidential envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army and the allegedly hasty removal of the Baath party. But he said these moves did not damage American efforts as significantly as the failure to anticipate and deal effectively with the longstanding fissure between the Sunnis and the Shiites.

Bass emphasized the role of sectarian violence in Iraq, saying the state of the region continues to worsen.

"The situation in Iraq is a civil war — not just a civil war but a relatively bad one, and one that is just getting started," Bass said. "The average length of a civil war post-1945 is 10 years. If Iraq has been in a civil war since the bombing of the shrine in Samara, then this war could go on until 2016."

To complicate matters further, he added, "civil wars rarely stay domestic ... and often end because of a decisive intervention by an outside power."

Bass went on to argue that an American failure in Iraq, which he said is the most likely scenario, would hold dire consequences for both countries.

"The overall loss of American credibility is already really substantial," he said. "This war was crushing for American credibility — the fact that the United States was so wrong about intelligence on [weapons of mass destruction] will make it difficult to persuade other nations in future cases of nuclear disarmament."

Friedberg said that the Bush administration's proposed "surge" in troops is the best option available to the United States at this point in time, adding that there were some early indications that it might be working. In a scenario for the future that Friedberg sketched out, he envisioned the security situation in Iraq being improved due to the surge, consequently buying time for a more stable political agreement and clearing the way for an American withdrawal.

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On the other hand, Friedberg suggested that a premature withdrawal of U.S. forces would trigger an escalating secterian conflict that could spread to other countries in the region, destabilizing the international oil market and triggering violence on a larger scale.

Responding to a question from the audience, Friedberg said that the chances of American success in Iraq, even with the increase in troops, were not especially good. " At the end of his prepared remarks, Bass made the same point even more starkly.

"I will close with pessimism," he said. "I think the war in Iraq has been very, very bad, and it's likely that it will get worse."

Entitled "The War in Iraq After Four Years," the panel was sponsored by the politics department and Wilson College as part of the Major Choices initiative, which aims to inform students about different departments' offerings before they choose their majors.

Correction

The original version of this article mischaracterized remarks made by politics and Wilson School professor Aaron Friedberg. Friedberg said that the troop increase in Iraq is the best option available to the United States at this time and hypothesized that there is a possibility of its eventually being successful in creating a more stable political situation in Iraq. The Daily Princetonian regrets the error.