Last week I was in New York for a roundtable meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations. The session was hosted by Max Boot, and I was paired for the event with Bing West, author of the excellent book “The Village” about counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War, and more recently “The Strongest Tribe,” one of the many books about the Iraq War that are appearing in print as the surge winds down. Later in the day I interviewed with Charlie Rose for a show that should air sometime this week. During the session he asked me an interesting question, “What is the biggest misconception the American people have regarding the war in Iraq?”
Quite frankly, there are many. I have written about the misconceptions regarding the surge in a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, “How the Surge Worked” (August 11, p. B-7). But there is a larger set of misconceptions that have to do with American strategic culture. Based on recent conflicts after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Americans have a belief in short wars fought with high technology and limited in time, space, and effort involved. Any informed study of war would suggest that these types of wars are an aberration, and that the historical norm is that wars are most often long, messy, expensive, and full of fog and friction that defy rational analysis up front of the means and ends necessary to wage them successfully. I have tried to convey this sense in “Baghdad at Sunrise,” both in the analysis of what went wrong in 2003-2004, and, in the final chapter of the book (“Reflections”), what we can look forward to in the next several decades. It is a debate worth continuing as Americans consider the strategic direction ahead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
