Ralph Peters looks back on 5 years in Iraq

March 20, 2008 -- ON the fifth anniversary of our campaign to remove Saddam Hussein's monstrous regime from power, it's hard not to despair - not because of the situation in Iraq, which has improved remarkably, but because so few American politicians in either party appear to have drawn the right lessons from our experience.

For the record, I still believe that deposing Saddam was justified and useful. He was a Hitler, and he was our enemy. But I'm still reeling from the snotty incompetence with which the Bush administration acted. Above all, I'm ashamed that I trusted President Bush and his circle to have a plan for the day after Baghdad fell.

All of our other failures in Iraq stemmed from this fundamental neglect of a basic requirement: Our soldiers and Marines reached Baghdad without orders or strategic guidance. We became the dog that caught the fire truck. The tragedy is that it didn't have to be that way: One thing our military knows how to do is plan.

But the relevant staffs were prevented from doing so. Ideologues and avaricious friends of the administration wanted the war for their own reasons, and they didn't intend to alarm Congress with high cost estimates. So they trusted the perfumed tales of a convicted criminal, Ahmad Chalabi, rather than the professional views of the last honorable generals then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not yet removed.

Even on the purely military side, the White House put its faith in hopeless gimmicks, such as "Shock and Awe," convincing itself that ground troops were an afterthought. Of course, it was the old-fashioned grunts, tankers, gunners and supply sergeants who had to get us to Baghdad.

Iraq just didn't have to be this hard. We made it immeasurably more difficult by trying to make war on the cheap, then turning the war's aftermath into a looting orgy for well-connected contractors.

The fundamental requirement to provide security for the population - a troop-intensive endeavor - went ignored, while grandiose reconstruction projects drained the pockets of American taxpayers, only to come to nothing. Our troops and their battlefield leaders did all they could under Rumsfeld's yes-man generals, but every other branch of our government ducked. The "interagency effort" was a joke.

Back home, Congress indulged in cheap partisanship. The State Department concentrated on building the world's largest and most-expensive embassy - a project worthy of Saddam himself - and let the spectacularly incompetent Ambassador L. Paul Bremer wreck what little hope of maintaining peace remained.

The administration's solution to worsening conditions was to send more compliant generals, to continue listening to think-tank "experts" who had never served in uniform, to keep cutting fat checks for contractors and to let our troops bleed between photo ops.

None of us should mistake the fundamental truth: The only reason our efforts in Iraq have not failed completely has been the sustained valor and commitment of those in uniform. Our military was the only government entity that did its job. Its thanks have been betrayal by the political opposition at home, a rash of movies portraying our troops as psychotics and crocodile tears from protesters who secretly delight in US casualties.

In 2007, after four bloody years of denial, a desperate administration finally got serious about military requirements, sending the additional troops (now weary) who should have been deployed in 2003. With the wretched Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld headed out the door, the president also permitted a serious soldier, Gen. David Petraeus, to take charge in Iraq.

We got lucky, too. Our global enemies in al Qaeda alienated Iraq's Sunni Arabs in record time, indulging in grotesque forms of oppression and terror even Saddam and his sons had never dared to inflict. Those who recently had sided with al Qaeda against us found that we were their only hope to be rid of al Qaeda. The Sunni-Arab flip in Iraq has been a great strategic victory that resounds throughout the Muslim world.

The troop surge also had a powerful psychological effect, convincing enemies, fence-sitters and local allies alike that we weren't quitting - despite the results of the US midterm elections. And the Iraqi people were just sick of the violence. By 2007, most had gotten the worst bile out of their systems and wanted normal lives.

Even the often chaotic, corruption-addled Iraqi legislature managed to pass more major bills in 2007 than the US Congress sent to the president's desk.

The situation in Iraq is improving, as I've seen with my own eyes. Despite our cavalcade of errors, there's hope (no audacity required) for a reasonable outcome: an Iraq that treats its citizens decently and that neither harbors terrorists nor menaces its neighbors.

We'll need to sustain a longer commitment than would have been the case had the administration's know-it-alls not regarded our best generals as fools back in 2003. The administration's disgraceful treatment of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was paradigmatic of its arrogance.

Meanwhile, those who held power over our military and misused it so disgracefully will never suffer as our military casualties and their families will for the rest of their lives. At most, those privileged men will experience disappointing sales of their self-serving memoirs. Cowards sent heroes to die.

I cannot help repeating the heartbreaking truth that it didn't have to be this hard, this bloody, or this expensive. This is what happens when war is made by amateurs. Has anyone in Washington learned that lesson?

It's a lesson that the left, as well as the right, needs to take to heart. While the Bush administration deserves every lash it gets, domestic opponents of the war have been hypocritical, dishonest and destructive. As this column long has maintained, had President Bill Clinton sent our troops to depose Saddam Hussein, Democrats would have celebrated him as the greatest liberator since Abraham Lincoln.

The problem for the left wasn't really what was done, but who did it. And hatred of Bush actually empowered him - the administration had no incentive to reach out to those who wouldn't reach back, so it just did as it pleased. Today's "antiwar" left also contains plenty of politicians who backed interventions in the Balkans and Somalia, who would be glad to send American troops to Darfur today and who voted for war in Iraq.

Both parties are quick to employ our military. It's the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party - each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.

Through it all, amazingly, our young men and women in uniform continue to serve honorably and skillfully, holding together not just Iraq but a fractured world. We whine and bicker. They re-enlist and go back to Iraq and Afghanistan. Where they're targets of scorn for our elitist media.

Given all our mistakes and partisan agendas, it's amazing Iraq is going as well as it is today. The improved conditions in Baghdad and most of the provinces verge on the miraculous, given the situation a year ago. But we've paid a needlessly high price.

As for President Bush, let's face it: He's been our most-inept wartime leader since James Madison fled the White House, leaving his wife behind to save what she could before the British troops arrived with torches.

That said, Bush has displayed one single worthy characteristic (one he shares, oddly enough, with Madison): He won't surrender.

As horribly as Bush performed for our first four years in Iraq, it's still possible to do worse. Both of the Democratic Party's presidential aspirants believe that the answer is to flee, handing the terrorists we've defeated a strategic victory, inviting a genocidal civil war, further destabilizing the Middle East, and sending the message to the world that Americans lack the courage and staying power of our enemies.

Declaring failure isn't the correct response to failure narrowly avoided. Both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would kill a struggling convalescent. Bush's shambles would become the next administration's catastrophe. As president, Obama or Clinton would finish with far more blood on his or her hands than President Bush has on his.

Was deposing Saddam Hussein a good idea? Yes. I still believe that. It was an act of vision and virtue. It's only a shame we didn't do it competently.

God bless the US military.