Iraq was a completely different animal. Firstly, it is strong and large and wealthy enough as a country to stand up to its neighbors (Iran and Syria). Afghanistan will never be large and rich enough to stand up to meddling by Pakistan and Iran, even if Afghanistan became cohesive as a state.
Secondly, the “surge” and “Anbar awakening” were working, and the plan was to reintegrate some of the Anbar/Sunni tribal elements into the Iraqi military. In the 2010 elections, the party/candidates with the most votes favored national unity government. Unfortunately, Obama/Biden had decided to wash their hands of Iraq out of spite and at the same time entreat Iran as the prime policy objective in the region. Iran was effectively allowed to back a soft coup which put in place a pro-Iranian government in 2010 rather than the one the Iraqis had elected. This government and Iranian elements and militias then began to cleanse government and the military of Sunni elements and a campaign of murder and terror was launched against the previously cooperative Anbar tribal leaders. That the Sunnis stood aside as ISIS swept through surprised no one. The Iraqi government and military had become an Iranian/Shiite tool.
The discretionary and unnecessary trashing of what was a fairly stable and obviously strategically important project in Iraq by the Obama administration (who at the same time covered their shame by declaring irrelevant Afghanistan “the good war”), the resulting increase in Iranian hegemony and sectarian terror, and the downplaying of the inevitable fundamentalist/terrorist Sunni reaction (Daesh/ISIS), which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and 5 million refugees across the region plus a rise in populism in the EU (due to immigration pressures and policies), has been little covered. Perhaps with Biden’s Afghanistan/Taliban debacle in the news, the media will look again at Obama/Biden’s abrupt withdrawal from Iraq (and the Iranian takeover they allowed), which was much more consequential (and still is an ongoing issue).
Agree with the first point — Iraq was a strong state able to stand up to Iran. Which is precisely why it was a terrible idea to destroy the Ba'athist state. The United States dismantled the military instrument and the state Saddam had built in 2003. Since then it has been a weak state and a playing field for foreign powers. Simply due to demography, this directly influenced Iranian influence in Iraq. It was not Obama's fault. It was Bush's. See my https://policytensor.com/2017/05/15/why-did-the-united-states-invade-iraq/.
Yes, the Anbar Awakening worked. But the moral economy of the Iraq war at home had collapsed by 2006. Despite the fact that the tide had turned, there was no longer any appetite stateside to see it through—echoes here of 1972, when the tide seemed to turn in Vietnam but support back home at completely collapsed. Obama's mandate was to wind it down, facts on the ground be damned. And Iranian influence had certainly become a major fact on the ground by the mid-2000s.
Why is Iraq of strategic importance to the United States? It is only slightly less irrelevant to the global balance of power than Afghanistan.
Who mentioned the war decision? Abandonment is the topic of the moment. I am talking about the discretionary decision to abruptly abandon a model that was working and relatively stable (compared to most of the region), and actually allow an Iranian soft coup to subvert election results in 2010. This was a much more grevious policy error than abruptly abandoning Afghanistan, which will never going to be stable under the American policy.
Campaign promise or not, the abandonment of Iraq was a mistake and an unforced error. A stable, multi-sectarian Iraq might have changed the whole region, and prevented some of the disaster that followed. Given the follow-on effects in Turkey, in EU policy (including Brexit), in Syria and Iraq (including the impact of unchecked sectarian terror by Iran across Iraq and Syria, and the massive human costs (refugees, genocide) the scale of the error seems obvious. I doubt the follow-on effects from Biden’s Afghanistan decision will be anywhere near as significant (fortunately).
Abandoning Afghanistan came about 15 years too late, in my opinion. It was never the good war nor a nation-building candidate. US interest was in removing al-Qaeda and ensuring Afghanistan wasn’t used as a base for terror operations. The key would be directly threatening Iran and Pakistan for any meddling that led to Afghanistan being used as a terrorist base. The Taliban itself (nor Afghan nationals generally) are not noted for launching terrorist attacks in Europe or the USA over the past 15 years (with a few exceptions). Hope that continues.
If we wanted Afghanistan not to be dominated by the Taliban, that would have required directly confronting Iranian and Pakistani action in the country and backing regional warlords who have local power bases. American entreaties toward the Karzai/Pashtun factions under Obama/Biden and later the current government under Trump, put their buddies (weakly connected leaders) into the regions, and many of the disenfranchised local warlords defected to the Taliban over the last 5-8 years. The Taliban rewarded these leaders with control (skimming) off of trade.
A lot of these war lords are not really Taliban and could be bought off and armed, if the US or India was interested in making life difficult for the Taliban or Pakistan, but there is little reason to care. We can criticize the slipshod manner and timing of Biden’s decision (and the incompetence of military and state dept careerists in never accepting Trump’s and Biden’s preference for withdrawal, and so never switching strategy on the ground), but the decision itself was inevitable and correct (and maybe 15 years late).
Interesting how the US gets emotional over countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and knocks them over willy-nilly, but when China sends us a virus that kills over half a million, there's barely a peep and we are still waiting for them to make a move.
Agree about Afghanistan, but I think attacking Taiwan a bunch of soaking wet infantry is PR fluff for recruitment purposes. IMO there is simply no case for it from the Chinese perspective. If a threat is called for, a simple land based missile barrage would do. It has the benefits of being far cheaper, and available right now, and harder to defend, and more menacing.
Talk of a naval blockade (by either side) has no credibility whatsoever, IMO, because it leads directly to sudden cessation of trade. This would cause multi-year pain for corporate stakeholders. Unlike, say, a hundred million people dying, which would probably be forgotten in a quarter or two. Politicians clumsy enough to ding up the money making apparatus get their power taken away. We've seen that already.
IMO the actual Chinese plan appears to be to change very little, and continue to out-build both Taiwan and the US in every category. There is absolutely no need for them to do anything else. The only item of first-class importance left to secure are chips, which will take a number of years.
The actual US plan appears to be to reconfigure things to slow down the Belt-Road scheme. Make deals with countries like Philippines, for example. Maybe rile up the locals in Kyrgyzstan to stop a railroad being built. Basically buying time for a technological breakthrough of some kind, and hope the other guy makes a mistake somewhere.
Hogwash. The CCP have been intentionally ambiguous about a timeline to retake Taiwan, which backs what ptb is saying. The CCP is in no rush to take Taiwan. They are fine with the status quo, which just means that China will have a greater edge over Taiwan (and a narrowing gap with the US) when the time comes. The only thing that the CCP cannot tolerate is Taiwan declaring independence. So far, the US has worked with China to restrain Taiwanese independence ambitions. Internally, the KMT are also against Taiwanese ambitions for independence. The big question is 1) if the DPP can continue to stay in power (likely as they have the youth) and 2) will the US will change its policy and back Taiwanese independence. Because at that point it becomes a hot war.
No US president has dared a major war with a peer for nearly 70 years. The US was able to put Japan and the USSR into the ground without firing a shot. China is a wholly different threat. It will be interesting to see how it plays out...
Not quite. Chinese strategists think of the 2020s as the 'window of opportunity'. They reckon that the PLA is already ready to stand up to the US. And that time is not on their side because of demographics.
Taiwan has technical skills, a population of 20 million, and would be defending an island. Already, Taiwanese have hollowed out the insides of quartz mountains and emplaced aircraft hangars, with double blast doors, etc.
On the other hand, "In 2019, Taiwan spent 1.7% of its gross domestic product on its military."
By way of comparison, in early years Israel spent up to 30% of GDP on military (some say more).
Should the US come to the defense of a nation that spends 1.7% of GDP on its military?
In any event, perhaps Taiwan, Australia, S Korea, Japan, Thailand, Philippines and maybe even India and Vietnam should form a defense pact, and build or buy many "silent" hunter-killer and ballistic submarines. I mean like several hundred total.
Commercial shippers tend to go to port or anchor immediately at the first sign of trouble. China would get choked pretty quickly, commercially speaking, if hostilities broke out.
China's surface naval fleet would be very vulnerable. Beijing could bomb Taiwan by missile or air, but risk getting bombed back.
Might be a good situation for the US to get uninvolved. The US might prove a paper tiger, and provide a false sense of security.
The days when Taiwan could put up a fight with China, even with regional allies, are long gone. The balance of power in the Western Pacific is a bipolar game between the United States and China. Local allies are competent and somewhat powerful (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, in that order). But they are not in a position to contain China on their own. If the United States abandons the region to its regional allies, the most likely scenario is that they will bandwagon with China rather than attempt to contain it.
I live in Thailand, which makes me an expert... :)
Haha, but it is true, that all over Asia, people are skeptical or worse of Beijing. Ask anyone in Vietnam. Australia. Taiwan. Thailand. Indonesia. Hong Kong. India. Japan. S Korea.
Sometimes this is foul racism against Han, but it is what it is.
Taiwan does not have win a war against mainland China. It just has to have the capability to sink a lot of ships, and mount a ferocious defense. China will accept the status quo, maybe with some window dressing. But Taiwan's spending 1.7% of GDP on defense may be the wrong signal.
Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. Maybe the next generation of Asians will think alliance with China is a good thing. Not for now.
Admire your writing as always, great post.
Iraq was a completely different animal. Firstly, it is strong and large and wealthy enough as a country to stand up to its neighbors (Iran and Syria). Afghanistan will never be large and rich enough to stand up to meddling by Pakistan and Iran, even if Afghanistan became cohesive as a state.
Secondly, the “surge” and “Anbar awakening” were working, and the plan was to reintegrate some of the Anbar/Sunni tribal elements into the Iraqi military. In the 2010 elections, the party/candidates with the most votes favored national unity government. Unfortunately, Obama/Biden had decided to wash their hands of Iraq out of spite and at the same time entreat Iran as the prime policy objective in the region. Iran was effectively allowed to back a soft coup which put in place a pro-Iranian government in 2010 rather than the one the Iraqis had elected. This government and Iranian elements and militias then began to cleanse government and the military of Sunni elements and a campaign of murder and terror was launched against the previously cooperative Anbar tribal leaders. That the Sunnis stood aside as ISIS swept through surprised no one. The Iraqi government and military had become an Iranian/Shiite tool.
The discretionary and unnecessary trashing of what was a fairly stable and obviously strategically important project in Iraq by the Obama administration (who at the same time covered their shame by declaring irrelevant Afghanistan “the good war”), the resulting increase in Iranian hegemony and sectarian terror, and the downplaying of the inevitable fundamentalist/terrorist Sunni reaction (Daesh/ISIS), which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and 5 million refugees across the region plus a rise in populism in the EU (due to immigration pressures and policies), has been little covered. Perhaps with Biden’s Afghanistan/Taliban debacle in the news, the media will look again at Obama/Biden’s abrupt withdrawal from Iraq (and the Iranian takeover they allowed), which was much more consequential (and still is an ongoing issue).
Agree with the first point — Iraq was a strong state able to stand up to Iran. Which is precisely why it was a terrible idea to destroy the Ba'athist state. The United States dismantled the military instrument and the state Saddam had built in 2003. Since then it has been a weak state and a playing field for foreign powers. Simply due to demography, this directly influenced Iranian influence in Iraq. It was not Obama's fault. It was Bush's. See my https://policytensor.com/2017/05/15/why-did-the-united-states-invade-iraq/.
Yes, the Anbar Awakening worked. But the moral economy of the Iraq war at home had collapsed by 2006. Despite the fact that the tide had turned, there was no longer any appetite stateside to see it through—echoes here of 1972, when the tide seemed to turn in Vietnam but support back home at completely collapsed. Obama's mandate was to wind it down, facts on the ground be damned. And Iranian influence had certainly become a major fact on the ground by the mid-2000s.
Why is Iraq of strategic importance to the United States? It is only slightly less irrelevant to the global balance of power than Afghanistan.
Who mentioned the war decision? Abandonment is the topic of the moment. I am talking about the discretionary decision to abruptly abandon a model that was working and relatively stable (compared to most of the region), and actually allow an Iranian soft coup to subvert election results in 2010. This was a much more grevious policy error than abruptly abandoning Afghanistan, which will never going to be stable under the American policy.
Campaign promise or not, the abandonment of Iraq was a mistake and an unforced error. A stable, multi-sectarian Iraq might have changed the whole region, and prevented some of the disaster that followed. Given the follow-on effects in Turkey, in EU policy (including Brexit), in Syria and Iraq (including the impact of unchecked sectarian terror by Iran across Iraq and Syria, and the massive human costs (refugees, genocide) the scale of the error seems obvious. I doubt the follow-on effects from Biden’s Afghanistan decision will be anywhere near as significant (fortunately).
Abandoning Afghanistan came about 15 years too late, in my opinion. It was never the good war nor a nation-building candidate. US interest was in removing al-Qaeda and ensuring Afghanistan wasn’t used as a base for terror operations. The key would be directly threatening Iran and Pakistan for any meddling that led to Afghanistan being used as a terrorist base. The Taliban itself (nor Afghan nationals generally) are not noted for launching terrorist attacks in Europe or the USA over the past 15 years (with a few exceptions). Hope that continues.
If we wanted Afghanistan not to be dominated by the Taliban, that would have required directly confronting Iranian and Pakistani action in the country and backing regional warlords who have local power bases. American entreaties toward the Karzai/Pashtun factions under Obama/Biden and later the current government under Trump, put their buddies (weakly connected leaders) into the regions, and many of the disenfranchised local warlords defected to the Taliban over the last 5-8 years. The Taliban rewarded these leaders with control (skimming) off of trade.
A lot of these war lords are not really Taliban and could be bought off and armed, if the US or India was interested in making life difficult for the Taliban or Pakistan, but there is little reason to care. We can criticize the slipshod manner and timing of Biden’s decision (and the incompetence of military and state dept careerists in never accepting Trump’s and Biden’s preference for withdrawal, and so never switching strategy on the ground), but the decision itself was inevitable and correct (and maybe 15 years late).
Interesting how the US gets emotional over countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and knocks them over willy-nilly, but when China sends us a virus that kills over half a million, there's barely a peep and we are still waiting for them to make a move.
As a Chinese foreign minister told the leaders of ASEAN: “China is a big country and you are small countries and that is a fact.”
China maliciously sent covid to the US?
Agree about Afghanistan, but I think attacking Taiwan a bunch of soaking wet infantry is PR fluff for recruitment purposes. IMO there is simply no case for it from the Chinese perspective. If a threat is called for, a simple land based missile barrage would do. It has the benefits of being far cheaper, and available right now, and harder to defend, and more menacing.
Talk of a naval blockade (by either side) has no credibility whatsoever, IMO, because it leads directly to sudden cessation of trade. This would cause multi-year pain for corporate stakeholders. Unlike, say, a hundred million people dying, which would probably be forgotten in a quarter or two. Politicians clumsy enough to ding up the money making apparatus get their power taken away. We've seen that already.
IMO the actual Chinese plan appears to be to change very little, and continue to out-build both Taiwan and the US in every category. There is absolutely no need for them to do anything else. The only item of first-class importance left to secure are chips, which will take a number of years.
The actual US plan appears to be to reconfigure things to slow down the Belt-Road scheme. Make deals with countries like Philippines, for example. Maybe rile up the locals in Kyrgyzstan to stop a railroad being built. Basically buying time for a technological breakthrough of some kind, and hope the other guy makes a mistake somewhere.
The CCP has committed to absorbing Taiwan by no later than the party's centenary in 2049.
Hogwash. The CCP have been intentionally ambiguous about a timeline to retake Taiwan, which backs what ptb is saying. The CCP is in no rush to take Taiwan. They are fine with the status quo, which just means that China will have a greater edge over Taiwan (and a narrowing gap with the US) when the time comes. The only thing that the CCP cannot tolerate is Taiwan declaring independence. So far, the US has worked with China to restrain Taiwanese independence ambitions. Internally, the KMT are also against Taiwanese ambitions for independence. The big question is 1) if the DPP can continue to stay in power (likely as they have the youth) and 2) will the US will change its policy and back Taiwanese independence. Because at that point it becomes a hot war.
No US president has dared a major war with a peer for nearly 70 years. The US was able to put Japan and the USSR into the ground without firing a shot. China is a wholly different threat. It will be interesting to see how it plays out...
28 years from now...
Not quite. Chinese strategists think of the 2020s as the 'window of opportunity'. They reckon that the PLA is already ready to stand up to the US. And that time is not on their side because of demographics.
Good post, thanks!
Did these clowns never read The Afghanistan Papers?
Taiwan has technical skills, a population of 20 million, and would be defending an island. Already, Taiwanese have hollowed out the insides of quartz mountains and emplaced aircraft hangars, with double blast doors, etc.
On the other hand, "In 2019, Taiwan spent 1.7% of its gross domestic product on its military."
By way of comparison, in early years Israel spent up to 30% of GDP on military (some say more).
Should the US come to the defense of a nation that spends 1.7% of GDP on its military?
In any event, perhaps Taiwan, Australia, S Korea, Japan, Thailand, Philippines and maybe even India and Vietnam should form a defense pact, and build or buy many "silent" hunter-killer and ballistic submarines. I mean like several hundred total.
Commercial shippers tend to go to port or anchor immediately at the first sign of trouble. China would get choked pretty quickly, commercially speaking, if hostilities broke out.
China's surface naval fleet would be very vulnerable. Beijing could bomb Taiwan by missile or air, but risk getting bombed back.
Might be a good situation for the US to get uninvolved. The US might prove a paper tiger, and provide a false sense of security.
The days when Taiwan could put up a fight with China, even with regional allies, are long gone. The balance of power in the Western Pacific is a bipolar game between the United States and China. Local allies are competent and somewhat powerful (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, in that order). But they are not in a position to contain China on their own. If the United States abandons the region to its regional allies, the most likely scenario is that they will bandwagon with China rather than attempt to contain it.
I live in Thailand, which makes me an expert... :)
Haha, but it is true, that all over Asia, people are skeptical or worse of Beijing. Ask anyone in Vietnam. Australia. Taiwan. Thailand. Indonesia. Hong Kong. India. Japan. S Korea.
Sometimes this is foul racism against Han, but it is what it is.
Taiwan does not have win a war against mainland China. It just has to have the capability to sink a lot of ships, and mount a ferocious defense. China will accept the status quo, maybe with some window dressing. But Taiwan's spending 1.7% of GDP on defense may be the wrong signal.
Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. Maybe the next generation of Asians will think alliance with China is a good thing. Not for now.