What We can Learn From the Iraq War

There are many lessons that we can learn from the debacle known as the Iraq War unfortunately none of these lessons seem to be seeping through to our leaders in Washington or the self appointed watchdogs in the media.
The first lesson from the Iraq War is that our military with its massive bureaucratic infrastructure, large formations and reliance on high tech firepower may not be capable of fighting the kind of war we are faced with. Our military forces can invade foreign countries and pound their cities to rubble but this doesn’t seem to be very good at battling insurgents, guerrillas and terrorists.
This is basically because our military is set up for what modern military thinkers call Third Generational Warfare that war between nations or rather their governments and we’re faced with Fourth Generational Warfare. Fourth Generation War is war waged by entities other than the state such as terrorist groups, criminal cartels, armed gangs and so on. Our military is very good at Third Generational Warfare that is dismantling enemy governments but not very good at Fourth Generational Warfare fighting armed forces other than states.
Our military’s unpreparedness wasn’t because we weren’t warned about Fourth Generational Warfare, no experts like Col. Bill Lind have been warning us about it for years. Our generals in the Pentagon simply ignored them and kept planning and training for last century’s war.
It’s obvious that we need a different kind of military, a smaller, leaner, meaner fighting force created to wage the dirty little wars. This new generation of soldiers would be armed with a new generation of weaponry designed for the new generation of warfare. This new military would be potent enough to destroy our enemies but small and subtle enough not to enrage local populations with massive armies of occupation.
The second lesson we should learn from the Iraq War is that our leaders seem to be completely ignorant of Islam and the Islamic World. For example, in Iraq the only actually fighting for the Iraqi nation are American troops. That is because the Iraqi nation is an artificial state created by British Imperialists in the 1920s so they could control that region of the Middle East. Before Winston Churchill dreamed it up in 1920, there was no Iraq, old Winston simply drew some lines on a map and gave his new state the name of a Medieval Arab province that hadn’t existed in centuries. The Iraqi people don’t consider themselves Iraqis, they consider themselves Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims or Kurds.
This means there can’t be such a thing as Iraqi democracy because democracy requires popular support and the idea of Iraq has no popular support. Like Communism and colonialism the Iraqi nation is an artificial construct imposed on people who don’t want it. If they vote, they’ll vote against the Iraqi nation and if the Iraqis fight they will fight Americans who try to force an Iraqi state on them.
Our leaders should have been aware of this after all the nature of Iraq’s creation is a well documented historical fact. As is the hostility that a great many Muslims have for the concepts of democracy and nationalism, but they weren’t. Sadly, none of our leaders either on the neoconservative right or the supposedly culturally sensitive politically correct left seems to know much about our enemy in this war, or the region he operates in. If neocons are blinded by grand dreams of Arab democracy the leftists are befuddled by the delusion that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, something disproved by the shallowest reading of history.
So will we learn any of these important lessons: that war has changed and our military needs to change with it and that we need to learn the history and culture of Islam anytime is soon. My guess is no we won’t learn until many more Americans come home in body bags and many innocent Americans die in incredibly fierce and destructive terrorist attacks on the US.