The $100 Barrel of Oil

One Step Behind

All signs point to "No." Since day one, U.S. perception of the facts on the ground has trailed reality. Wrong perceptions have led to wrong strategies. And wrong strategies have created worse facts. We are now at the final stage of this vicious cycle.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, the expectation was that it would follow a "liberator strategy," focused on decapitating leadership and quickly transitioning authority to existing bureaucratic and security institutions.

Instead, it undertook an occupation. The Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the armed forces and dismantled Iraq's civil service with its Baathist purge. By woefully underestimating the force levels needed to enforce security in a country without a functional military or government, the U.S. opened the door to the insurgency.

As the insurgency grew, the U.S. failed to recognize the strategic implications of the changed dynamics. Instead shifting to a counter-insurgency strategy, it dismissed insurgents as "a few dead-enders" and "stay[ed] the course" of its occupation strategy, managing reconstruction by CPA fiat and seeking to provide security through high-kinetic combat engagements (like the U.S. assault on Fallujah). Unsurprisingly, U.S. troops won tactical engagement after engagement, only to surrender the ground to insurgents when they advanced to the next hotspot.

The result was insecurity and a loss of faith by the Iraqi people in coalition forces. Sectarian militias rushed to fill the vacuum, igniting cycles of killings that hardened ethnic allegiances. Hopes that the national government could broker peace withered in the face of impotence, corruption and the infiltration of government security services by sectarian operatives, and Iraq fell into civil war.

Once again, however, U.S. strategy was one step behind the facts on the ground. Faced with rising sectarian violence, the White House declared that "there is not a civil war going on" and announced that it would finally pursue a counter-insurgency "surge" strategy.

But the strategic challenge is no longer the fight between insurgents and coalition forces -- it is the fight between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis. A counter-insurgency solution cannot solve a civil war problem.