US Historian: US May Lose the Iraqi War

Zaman Daily News | December 25 2004

US military historian Major Isaiah Wilson III has said the US failed to develop a post-war strategy for Iraq and underestimated the intervention of the Iraqi public in the war. A copy of Wilson's essay on the Iraq war that was presented at various conferences but never published was obtained by the Washington Post.

Wilson said that after being at war in Iraq for 21 months, the US has still been unable to plan the provision of stability through occupation in the country and has failed to understand what this war means to the Iraqi public.

The Washington Post commented that such criticism by an individual so strategically positioned to be close to top secret strategy experts is very significant and meaningful. Many generals and military officers from the US army have accused Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the government's civil administers for failing to predict the consequences of the Iraqi occupation, but Wilson holds army commanders responsible for failing to understand the situation in Iraq because they could not plan to win properly. He described those planning the war as suffering from "stunted learning and a reluctance to adapt."

The Post writes: "Wilson's essay amounts to an indictment of the education and performance of senior U.S. officials involved in the war. "U.S. war planners, practitioners and the civilian leadership conceived of the war far too narrowly" and tended to think of operations after the invasion "as someone else's mission," he says. In fact, Wilson says, those later operations were critical because they were needed to win the war rather than just decapitate Saddam Hussein's government. "

Because of its reluctance to even define the situation, Wilson says, "the U.S. military remains "perhaps in peril of losing the 'war,' even after supposedly winning it."