Operation Iraqi Freedom

My favorite piece of the material we read for this class is O’Hanlon’s piece “Iraq Without a Plan.” I liked O’Hanlon’s writing style, but his message also resonated with me, as he argued that the real problem with U.S. intervention in Iraq was the lack of planning beforehand. His first argument on this comes right at the beginning of the article when he calls it a tragedy “that one of the most brilliant invasion successes in modern military history was followed almost immediately by one of the most incompetently planned occupations” (O’Hanlon). O’Hanlon then continues to diagnose the issues he found to be associated with occupation and he questions why the U.S. government had oversights, such as not considering the fact that there would be a problem with security after the Hussein regime fell.

            O’Hanlon comments on how the United States involved in Iraq with a metaphor. He says, “entering into this conflict without a readiness to quickly restore order in post-Saddam Iraq was the military equivalent of going into open heart surgery without extra units of blood on hand just because the head surgeon insisted that he had devised a new procedure that would make such precautions unnecessary” (O’Hanlon). This was my favorite excerpt from the readings because it was very poetic and I think it makes very solid commentary on what happened in Iraq and what O’Hanlon sees as the main problem. O’Hanlon is concerned that people did not speak up against Rumsfeld, encourage more troops to be sent, or question how things were being done. Overall, the length of the U.S. stay in Iraq and the unexpected difficulties upon being there are all a result of poor planning. Essentially, the mission could have been as simple as it was supposed to be if the appropriate number of troops were sent and strategy was planned a little more carefully rather than assuming certain issues would not arise.

            As far as personalities involved with leading the United States through its engagement in Iraq, I was also interested in the commentary of Secretary Powell. In Counter Jihad, it states, “Powell argued that if Americans ‘broke’ Hussein’s Baathist government, then the U.S. military would, by necessity, become occupiers to rebuild central authority” (Williams 178). This idea was incredibly astute, as Powell seemed to be one of the only voices of high rank in U.S. government that was outright questioning the process of involvement in Iraq. Questions are raised in my mind about government officials and whether they truly underestimated how long it would take to rebuild a government in Iraq or if the plans were just so careless and ignorant that the whole thing was an oversight.

After the fall of Hussein and heading into the period of occupation, Bush declared, “the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free” (Bush 175). This contributes to the narrative of inadequate planning. It is as clear here as it is everywhere else that the U.S. military leaders involved in Iraq intervention by-and-large considered the overthrow of the Hussein regime to be the most difficult part of the process and completely underestimated what would be required of them in the subsequent time period. The U.S. would be stuck in Iraq attempting to pick up the pieces of a government that was shattered.