The Iraq War In Perspective

As a military historian of 40-odd years, I have a view of this perhaps more informed by history than some. In that regard, I have an appreciation for pre-emption and for the dangers of hindsight some others may not have:

Pre-emption: If ever there was a clear cut case for pre-emption, the Iraq War was it. This was clearer-cut than Midway, Agincourt, or the 6-day War, and it's and right up there with the British fireships set against the Armada in the Veldt. Here was a case of a clearly demonstrated aggressor with the expressed desire and apparent means to wreak havoc in a very sensitive part of the world. Everyone in a position to know agreed that he had the means, aka WMD, and Congress voted overwhelmingly to take whatever steps were necessary to bring him to bay. Battle of Agincourt

Pre-emption is a difficult proposition, partially for the reason that the overt act which would provide the cause of action and unite the country is, by definition, pre-empted and does not therefore occur. To those not paying full attention, this can look like un-provoked aggression.

Another issue I think not fully appreciated by those who haven't studied this stuff, is the problematic and inexact nature of intelligence. The Pearl Harbor attack is a pretty good illustration of this: there was strong indication that something was afoot during late-November early-December 1941, but an attack on Hawaii was pretty far down the list of possibilities. Wouldn't it have been better to have caught the Japanese Fleet with their pants down in the North Pacific than to lose the Pacific Fleet and 2200+ guys? FDR chose to absorb the first punch rather than take the heat for taking the country to war "unprovoked". George W Bush, to his [apparently future] credit, chose the opposite path.

Which brings us to Hindsight 1.0: In the classic sense, it's painfully easy to judge historical events in light of later ones. The criticism of the Iraq war via the fact that WMD was not found in Iraq is a classic example of this kind cheap hindsight. Yes, the "inspectors" didn't find WMD, but that didn't mean they weren't there, especially in view of Hussein's obfuscation ante. As noted earlier, intelligence is inexact and frequently contains conflicting information. Ask the Marines at Tarawa, the Persians at Salamis, the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest, Nagumo at Midway, Custer at the Little Bighorn, or any opponent of the Germans in the Ardennes -- there is truly an endless list of examples where intelligence turned out to be wrong.

As Hugh Trevor-Roper observed, "history is not the study of what happened. It is the study of what happened in the context of what might have happened". The intelligence officer has the very difficult job of sifting thru unlimited bits of information trying to figure out which is valid and fits a pattern prior to the event occuring. I do not think the average person appreciates the enormity of this task. The focus tends to be on the times when they "got it wrong". I would challenge any of these Monday moring quarterbacks to stand in the intelligence officer's shoes and "get it right".

Hindsight 2.0: Knowing what course was tried and didn't work out. This confers the huge advantage on the critic of having to pick only from other seemingly logical choices, while eliminating the one chosen, even tho that may have been the most logical course at the time. Historians do this all the time, whether they realize it or not. The myriad critics of the Japanese at the Battle of Midway fault Yamamoto for not having the Main Body nearer where the main battle occurred, not waiting until either Shokaku or Zuikaku could be re-fit and included, sending Hosogaya off to the Aleutians, and on and on. Such criticism demands a level of prescience on the part of Yamamoto and Nagumo that is simply super-human. I won't get into it here, but there were very good reasons for the choices Yamamoto made, based upon Imperial Navy battle history during the previous 45 years, and the hard realities confronting him in June of 1942. Yamamoto didn't have the advantage of later critics employing Hindsight 1.0: knowing what a major role air power would play in future warfare and what an unpredictably minor role Mahanian big-gun tactics, the then-recently adopted Bible of naval warfare, would be relegated to.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder made the observation clear to any student of military history: no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The Japanese were certainly an extreme example of this (see my paper "The Other Reasons Japan Lost the War"), but any armed conflict provides illustrations, including the War in Iraq. It is simply impossible to foresee everything that's going to happen, how the enemy will react, and every piece of equipment that will be needed, let alone get it produced and in the field. The critics of everything from the post-war unrest to the lack of "up-armored Humvees" clearly had no understanding of this, but focused on such shortcomings to the exclusion of all that went as planned. They (probably unwittingly) had the advantage of Hindsight 2.0: knowing what course was tried and didn't work out, at least as smoothly as those "experts" sitting at their computer keyboards thought they should have. Moltke the Elder

Hindsight 2.1: The "What-If". I don't mind these exercises when they are undertaken for intellectual stimulation and fun (if the South had won the Civil War, the Japanese Midway, etc). However, the idea that the historian can predict with any accuracy what would have happened had a now more attractive choice been made (the one actually made having been eliminated via Hindsight 2.0) is highly problematic. I am not a lot of things, and a mathematician is among them, but there must be some law that says that the predictability of events decreases exponentially with each step away from the last known event. What if General Pickett hadn't been ordered to have his division charge across the field? All we really know is, probably, that he still would have had his division, Armistead and Garnett by the next day. The idea that Lee would have won the battle is a huge leap based upon a series of assumptions which rapidly become less and less valid, based as they are upon previous dubious assumptions. General Pickett

Hindsight 3.0: Knowing the result and being able to pick out later what led to it, along with Hindsight 3.1: Not understanding how those on the spot could have been so blind, and Hindsight 3.2: parading forth as a genius anyone who appears to have predicted it, notwithstanding that it may have been the only time he was right. This is my favorite because it is so common and those engaging in it seem not to realize it. The investigations into the Pearl Harbor attack are historically the most glaring examples of this. I'm sorry, but NO ONE outside Japan thought the Japanese had the ability to attack Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. There are countless histories of the attack condeming Kimmel, Short, and others for not, in light of information they had or should have had, knowing when and where the attack was coming. And Hector Bywater is inevitably dredged up as having predicted it, yadda, yadda. Well, ya know what? A lot of stuff was predicted that didn't come true, and those having to call the shots at the time had to sift thru all those bits of intelligence without knowing which would be relevant and without knowing the future. It is extremely easy for any reasonably focused historian to cherry-pick bits of evidence that, taken to together and to the exclusion of all conflicting and now clearly irrelevant contemporary information, appear to form an unmistakable pattern leading to the known event. The contemporary decision maker doesn't have that advantage. There is a delightfully obsequious parody of this in Act II Scene 7 of The Mikado involving Pooh Bah, Koko, and Pitti Sing.

The criticism of the failure to find WMD's in Iraq is the most recent example of Hindsight 3.0,1,and 2. Prior to the invasion, Saddam was acting to any rational, observant person like someone with something to hide, dancing the inspectors all over the desert, flouting 17 or so UN Resolutions, etc, etc. Under Clinton, it was beginning to look like a replay of Hitler vs the League of Nations. To Bush's everlasting credit, clearly the right thing was done at the time in invading. Later criticism that everything didn't go exactly as planned is just real cheap.

Hindsight 4.0: Examining only those things that did not work out and condemning those who had to make the decisions that led to them, while other things that potentially had similiar problems, but happened to work out, are not examined. It just seems logical to me that, to be valid, criticism of errors (clear in hindsight) that led to an unfavorable outcome ought to be offset by credit for those that developed favorably. Problem is that the stuff that worked out despite the same sorts of errors having been made is harder to spot later and doesn't get the critic the (cheap) ink because it all worked out.

One of the truer observations about military history is that armies are always prepared to fight the last war. The above are some of the reasons: armies beat themselves up over what went wrong in the previous war and take steps to remedy it. The difficulty of predicting what will be important in the next war is borne out by the inevitable unpreparedness of armies to fight it.